


Cinematography

by pseudoactual_mahou



Category: Original Work
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-11-10 03:42:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11119182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudoactual_mahou/pseuds/pseudoactual_mahou
Summary: A story straight from far-off Movieland. Turn the lights down low and enjoy.





	1. Chapter 1

For weeks, Visha had woken up at eight A.M. to listen to radio discussions on the Pygmalion Killer. Like everything on local radio, the reports were highly speculative and a little paranoid about all the violence. Of course, the thing was that all the victims were wrights, and the gore and agony and carved flesh (realistic silicone gel with haptic feedback, but who’s counting) were, in fact, props. It all came back around to that: in the disjunction between gleaming artificial carcass, its innards all servos and densely packed gyroscopic balance equipment, and the gobbets of anonymous silicone meat, there was a real, unforgettable thrill. 

Monday’s dead wright was a direct customer service model, class “Annabel,” with the plain-yet-pretty character design that came standard to cashiers: chestnut hair, modest uniform, and clean hands. She’d worked the register at a Varga gas station, the upscale one that could afford wright labor, by the little corporate retreat building downtown. On occasion, before Annabel’s death — was it technically destruction? Or dismantling? Decommissioning was too formal — Visha had dropped in there to check on the limited edition potato chip flavors. She’d gotten to know her cashier, in a sense. Annabel would say “Pomegranate’s a novel flavor, isn’t it?” for example, or “Visha, right? Today’s recommended item is the chicken cutlet, but you seem like a ’Italian sandwich’ type.” She wouldn’t get an answer, but modern customer service wrights, unlike their not-too-distant predecessors, could deal with silence without seeming awkward or unnatural. “Mind you, wasabi chips are also pretty bizarre. That’ll be seven-fifty,” for example. And then she’d swipe the bag’s bar code across the little black panel in the middle of the counter, bag it, hand it to Visha, and that would be the end of it. 

The Annabel never tried too hard to engage reticent customers. It was the reason Visha preferred Varga gas stations.  Filling up her car and buying coffee and chips were just a routine with Annabel, not the _full, charming social_   _experience_ touted by Kourai Robotics advertising. On the other hand, when she checked the online report on the Pygmalion Killer’s new attack, the news site referred to Annabels as “an unpopular class of wright,” so “laid-back and casual” might’ve been the wrong way to go for the gas station, profit-wise. Not to mention that the photos of the Annabel “corpse” made Visha feel very little. But then, it was likely (she figured) that her feelings on Annabel had been along the lines of an attachment to a reliable household appliance, or a vending machine with a good selection. It didn't keep her from visiting the station again. Monday’s limited-edition flavor was vanilla. 

The cashier was a substitute from a nearby organic grocery store — “Cherry,” according to her name tag, a blonde with muscle tone counterbalanced by trendy-trim shoulders and farmer’s-daughter freckles. She mentioned calories and recipes and deals, and even after she took the hint in Visha’s disinterest she stood at attention, eager and forthright, prepared to volunteer anything. It made Visha want to smoke, though she’d quit years ago.

“A pack of Sirens, please." 

“Didn't you quit, hon?" 

“Not yet." 

“Ah, well." 

As Cherry’s hand roamed the cigarette standee, picking out a pack of Siren Light Unfiltereds, Visha inspected the nape of her neck. It was easy to miss — Varga work uniforms were high-collared — but her posture made the seam obvious, a region of rubbery flesh curved slightly outwards, with grooves for a technician’s fingers. Cherry’s own seam was slightly discolored, sallow, compared to the ruddy health of the skin of her face. Visha knew that it extended down to the small of her back; wrights’ "brains” were primarily localized in their torsos, with the head mostly devoted to audio and the various servos that operated their facial expressions. The sight of it, of clear inhumanity, was somehow comforting. Cherry let her go with a “Stay safe!” In defiance of that, she lit up directly outside, almost hacked out a lung, and checked the photos on her phone again. 

The quality of the photos was less than stellar. To Visha’s discerning eye, the scene just looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to a mannequin in a parking lot; the stains around the “corpse" might as well have been “auburn" hair dye or Red No. 2. The eyes were dull, but they looked like chips of plastic, surprised in a dull and distant way, and the light from the camera’s flash caught one eye at an angle that revealed it to be flat, not to mention cracked. The arms were sprawled, the legs kicked out casually, and whoever had tried to compromise between tact and titillation in depicting its ruined temple had chosen an angle that seemed pointlessly coquettish, hiding the meat of the injury behind Annabel’s lolling head. It had all the tastelessness of a celebrity nipple shot without the actual metaphorical nipple. 

All she could do was wait for the forensics to leak, she decided. Reputable sources claimed that the forensic photographers and sketch artists on the case knew their cinematography, and were, in fact, fans of the Killer’s work. It would account for the perfect shots — stunned, terrified eyes gazing out of plastic faces, lips stained — that surfaced on the internet. Not this amateur hour tripe. 

* * *

 

Moon Island cafés were typically open-air — the warm, arid weather and the jagged skyline provided an ideal backdrop for tea and intimate conversation. At night, when the billboards lit and usurped the stars, outdoor seating became the floor to a luminous abyss. Cyberia existed in defiance of that beauty: it was a street-level box the color of an old CRT monitor case, with windows so papered with ads as to be useless, a relic. It was going out of business, and had been for a while. Her work clothes on, Visha opened the door and stepped into Cyberia, taking a second as its aura hit her. 

It would be inaccurate to say that the smell — living bodies, overheated computers and processed food waste — no longer affected her. She certainly didn’t react to it, but that was less due to building tolerance and more to the way it had carved grooves in her brain, destroyed key nerves to hasten its acceptance. It did that to everyone, sooner or later, if they worked the counter — not that it was a real counter so much as a table with a cash register and a desktop, set up in the clearing separating the front door from the forest of cubicles which served as booths. That overwhelming submission to the smell was almost worse than the mugginess, the still, oppressive quality of the air which could not be reasonably described — though, of course, one heralded the other. And the damn fan — no one had ever seen the damn fan. It was only a far-off whirring sound in another room, shoving around air which was already stale and sullen and somehow only making it staler and more sullen. 

Cyberia was like this, and it still earned an almost sustainable profit, because its customers were people who wanted small, private rooms and fast internet, and who would not notice anything about the building from their little cubicle-booths except whether their doors could lock. She was always late, and they never noticed. 

The manager had invested in a wireless register of customers’ orders on the elderly computer available to employees. It was a little blue list of names, with orders, dietary restrictions, etc. listed in black. Visha scrolled through the list until she found the name she was looking for, Melville, in cubicle twelve. Melville wanted a ginger beer and a freshly made meatball sub, but she was going to have to settle for an industrially manufactured sandwich, decided Visha, as she stuck the plastic container in the microwave. After a minute on High, it _dinged_ , coming out on just the wrong side of “soggy,” and she stuck it on a plate, the cold ginger beer in her other hand. It took almost as much time to navigate the cubicles and reach number twelve, as narrow as the corridors were. But there it was: #12. She knocked, once. Neat. 

“Visha, ‘zat you?" 

“I’m here with your meal." 

“Got it.” The latch clicked as Melville disabled it. “Come on in." 

The fingers which had undone the lock were long and solid, with untrimmed nails. As Visha came in, their owner didn’t look up from her cherry-red laptop. Instead, she just tapped the table with one hand, in an economic movement that let her maintain her 85 wpm average. Visha set the tray down, poured the ginger beer into an old bar glass, then sat down opposite Melville and waited. 

“…and there." 

Visha kept waiting. 

“You remember Zappa?" 

Visha tried to remember Zappa and couldn’t. “From the forums?" 

“The one who hates me, yeah.” 

“That Zappa. The name is familiar.” She didn’t, but people who hated Melville were Melville’s favorite subject, so she kept mum. “What about them?" 

“About him." 

“Alright. What about him?" 

“Dude is not part of the reality-based community. Like, seriously, we are talking an order of _magnitude_ worse than the average forums user." 

“How so?" 

“So Zappa starts another shitstorm in the Pig Killer thread, going on this long cringey rant, blah blah moral imperative to burn down buildings on the evidence of blurry screengrabs, et cetera. And he goes for me, of course, because that’s just how he is." 

“Or he hates you." 

“Yeah, right, and it’s, like, particularly damning evidence to him that I live _here_ , because we’re all amoral technocrats and our fat paychecks are dependent on reinforcing the monolithic evil. Naturally, I’m an expat with no contacts, and I tell him that it’s this or starve. And he tells me I’m lying." 

“And…?" 

“And what fucks with me is that it was just one bullet point on his list. Two sentences, ‘you’re lying, it’s obvious,’ then back to nitpicking and _ad hominem_. Like, it’s not even something he thinks he has to argue for! It’s just a _given_ to himthat what looks like moral ambiguity, even if it’s minor, is always a conscious, malicious lie." 

Melville gulped down the last of her ginger beer as if it were hard liquor, all in one gasp, then slammed her glass back down. 

“I mean, what kind of worldview does that to you?" 

Visha waited five seconds for an answer, which, in her experience, would come across as polite. When she didn’t get one, she asked, “Is that a rhetorical question?" 

“Let’s say it is. Because I know these folks are not rare. But I still… god, I don’t want to know, ultimately it’s just assholes finding excuses to be assholes again.” With an _ugh_ , she turned back to her work with the long-suffering patience of a disrespected saint. As was expected of her, Visha gathered up the glass and what remained of the meatball sub on her tray and stood to return them, fumbling with the door latch with one free hand. 

“By the way, I got those screenshots you were asking for.” It didn’t sound important when Melville said it; it was a talent of hers to render unentertaining things also insignificant. “Kind of sick and pointless, but I guess you need it for your whatever." 

“Very little in life is pointless." 

“That so? Probably a good attitude." 

* * *

 

Visha’s baton was self-defense grade, for civilian use: the handle beneath her hand was rubber, with grooves to ensure an ergonomic grip, and it tapered into a matte black length of metal and plastic a little longer than a foot, tipped with a little piece of metal. As the wright turned to run, pivoting on his foot and beginning to accelerate, she drew it from its holster and in a single motion dealt him a rattling blow to the joint of his left leg, making it spasm. The wright didn’t scream or gasp — they weren’t built that way — but he did delay just for a moment before lurching forward with a maladaptive gait. It was a little pathetic, so she bent her wrist, then _snapped_ it forward, aiming for the back of his leg, but he swiveled and caught it on his arm with a motion that almost seemed practiced and was thus probably automatic. There was a thick “ _chrk_ ” noise as the actuators in the wright’s forearm, jarred by an act of violence, locked themselves to ensure safety, forcing the whole structure of arm to freeze up to the shoulder. She thrust out a palm and pushed herself off of it, half-intending to throw him off balance. The wright wobbled a few steps back, turned to run again and almost made it through a step before Visha drew back her baton and smashed the back of his leg, which likewise stiffened into immobility. 

Unable to stay up, the wright hit the ground hard, his self-preservation programming already making him crawl with desperate little scrabbling movements, trying to dig into the pavement with his bare fingers. It was almost grotesque, watching the legs jerk behind. Visha planted a foot on its back and shifted her weight, slowly, until he wasn’t mobile at all. Then she dug around in her pocket and drew her Swiss army knife, flicked out the blade and took it to the first layer of filmy skin, which peeled up with a sound like cellophane. 

The rubbery flesh around its seam tore away with minor sawing, exposing the edges of the case, but she had to peel it off by hand afterwards, which took a good ten minutes. Once that was done — a long strip of bloodless, boneless skin discarded to the side of the street, like a slab of lunchmeat in a deli — it was a simple matter to thrust the baton into the gap and twiddle it around, letting the magnet do its work. Sensitive motor controls, customer information and facial recognition software randomized, forcing one last great spasm through the metal body beneath Visha’s boot. She prodded it over and prodded it a few times, but it only shuddered for a second, an aftershock, then stilled completely. She kicked it: the same result. Satisfied by the effectiveness of the night’s work, Visha hoisted the dead weight over one shoulder and walked back into the alley. The drop point for her body bag was only two blocks away, but it was always worth minimizing the risk of being seen lugging an apparent human corpse. 

Of course, carrying a bag which — thanks to popular media — had long become shorthand for illicit cadaver disposal wasn’t much better; if not for the lateness of the hour and the dearth of good takeaway places nearby, there might easily have been enough people roaming the streets to stop her. Thankfully, there was a car at the charging station nearby, a Polaris electric truck which had been built before Moon Island implemented its “lightning streets,” and thus one which could be driven on condemned roads without its battery dying. Visha signaled it over and stuffed her cargo into the trunk, then opened the front passenger’s-side door and laid down on the reclined seat. Off came her gloves, black leathery things, and the thin jacket, which she tucked underneath her head. She’d sleep on the way. “‘m ready." 

“Yes’m,” replied the self-driving system, in a tinny voice. “Our destination is ‘the disposal area,' address unregistered. Is this correct?" 

“Go ahead." 

“Acknowledged. The trip should take approximately two hours, roundabout. I will awaken you shortly before arrival. Rest well, ma’am." 

“Mmm.” She felt the slow, smooth acceleration of the car in her gut, but kept her eyes open for a few seconds more, staring up at the city skyline: smooth, faceless buildings everywhere, buildings that crowded out the moon.

* * *

 

A soft chime woke her up. 

“Ma’am, we’ve arrived at our final destination." 

“Right.” Visha rolled out of her seat and the car, managing to land on her feet outside; nearby lampposts lit with soft halogens in response, partially lighting the staircase leading to her destination. As she walked up the stairs to the front door of the building, breathing in the warm, clean air of a relatively unspoiled climate, the truck drove away casually, as if it weren’t illegal to own or operate. She passed by a window on her way to her door and recognized its headlights, pulling away back to wherever it went when it wasn’t shuttling her around. Her door was next to the window, with no nameplate. 

Her apartment — first floor, one bathroom, one bedroom — was paid for by her employers, which made her thankful, on some level, for Moon Island City housing standards. Between the extreme poles of the zero-privacy capsule hotel and sleeping on the top floor of a building named after yourself, there were precious few options, most intended for startup founders or middle-tier non-genius coders. Visha’s was the low end of high-end, clean, dry and consistently heated, with kitchenette access, groceries delivered, also on behalf of her employers, Wi-Fi and TV. Closing the door behind her, she opened up the fridge, scanned the contents, and decided on an omelette, ham and spinach, for the iron, and to compensate for her snacking. And… yes, a canned coffee from the vending machines outside, which she’d stockpiled for work nights. To avoid insomnia, she poured half a can into one of her glasses, and stuck the rest back in the fridge, then cracked a few eggs into her iron skillet and turned up the heat. 

Soon, a wholesome omelette aroma filled the room, overpowering the usual un-lived-in scent of rarely used rooms. Visha tipped the finished product from the skillet onto a plate — it left behind a thin film of sticky egg, as per usual — took her half-dram of coffee, collated them on her bedside table, and switched on the TV, with its colors that were always slightly off. It was one A.M., a night so dark or a sky so light-polluted — was there a difference? — as to blot out the stars, and that meant _movie night_. 

“TV, is the Amir Munir marathon on channel 38?" 

“Yes, ma’am." 

“Switch to 38, please." 

The screen cut to a silent vista of a field of flowers, a long panning shot of a _Sound of Music_ idyll with shakycam, ramping up as it tracked two or three desperate teenagers in heavy jackets. She recognized the movie:  _Springtime Reader_ , not a breakout hit like the others, but critically acclaimed and well-received enough for several nominations for independent film awards. Visha leaned back and took a swig of her cold-but-not-iced coffee, and watched the three of them — it _was_ three — running from a figure just out of sight behind a field of crooked flowers, camera angle low as if driving them or grabbing for their heels, a thin reedy song of vengeance piping through the speakers… and there was the moment that everyone missed, the shot of a woman’s long-nailed hand buried in a stained pocket, bulging slightly with a severed finger, ripening and rotting in the fresh, temperate air. It was a wet gleam, and immensely satisfying. 


	2. Chapter 2

In the morning, Visha had a banana, an egg sandwich and a can of Red Peony, after which it was time for a trip outside the city proper. It was a slow transition, primarily marked by the lack of glass and lights, and by the dimming of the lightning streets. The strips of inoffensive solid color which marked them faded, became erratic or discolored, and vanished entirely at an intersection. That was around where the ground turned asphalt and the sidewalks turned concrete, where all the streetlights sagged in direct contradiction of the clean design aesthetic of the rest of Moon Island City. It wasn’t run-down, as such — she wasn’t far enough from the city center for that — but it was certainly less polished, built for poorer tourists and the island's remaining human laborers. She sniffed the air and smelled ozone. It was possible that there would be rain.

Her destination was far enough away that she had to sit down and take a break before entering, in a run-down old bus shelter from the days when the buses still ran. Sitting there, she could take in the dual skylines exposed by local architecture. To the west, the mirrored skyscrapers of Moon Island City proper, and to the east, the staggered sprawl of decrepit buildings and roads, and a faint suggestion of the warehouses and factories studding Mt. Kaguya. It was relaxing, in a way, until a shape crossed her field of vision. It was an Kourai anticrime wright, in a harshly lined uniform. “Full Capacity Enforcement & Defense” was stenciled on the back in sharp lettering. He gave her a once-over, matching her gaze for just a second too long — his eyes were sort of flat and glazed, like some older models — then turned away and kept walking. She watched him go with no little relief. There was always something unnerving about seeing wrights authorized to use force, given her career. It was like a farmer bringing cows to the slaughter, and seeing one with razor teeth gnawing on a human femur.

Feeling half-rested, Visha stood and walked the last few blocks to the Black Sunfish, a brass building where a few cars — mostly rentals, the kind only tourists used — were sitting outside. As the double doors swung open, she inhaled a new scent, an artificial saltwater scent, like the sea if you could can the sea and preserve it for later. That was how the Black Sunfish Sushi Restaurant always smelled, because even with modern refrigeration, wrights to ship in the fish and specialized air fresheners, it was still sited inland for no good reason, and had to buy its raw-seafood-restaurant authenticity wholesale.

Without a word, the lady at the front desk directed Visha to the sushi bar, which spanned the length of the Sunfish’s back wall. She sat down on the bronze swivel-stool and ordered a few pieces of sashimi and something with a complex name, though she didn’t have the palate to determine whether her order would be any good or not. It wasn’t too long after the food arrived that a figure in a climate-inappropriate suit jacket sat down next to her.

“Still not interested in the world of alcohol, then?”

“Never managed to quit cigarettes completely. So I might as well not start on these, is my thinking.”

“Someday you’ll let me treat you to a glass or two.” Golde sighed, theatrically, then waved over the man behind the counter. “Suzu, whatever it was last time, I’ll take a small glass. Houraisen something. And clam sashimi.” He nodded and stepped into the back, where they kept the higher-caliber drinks.

“Before I forget…” Golde withdrew a yellow envelope from her jacket and slid it to Visha. “Two hundred LD.” Visha pocketed it, because Moon Island City didn’t have any post offices. For packages, most of the local corps and offices had bicycle couriers on call, fresh-faced science enthusiast types with zero employability anywhere else on-island (when they weren’t wrights). For everything else, there were city messaging accounts, like company email addresses writ large. Discreet transactions, in order to be untraceable, couldn’t be conducted over city networks, ostensibly secure but riddled with holes in practice — hence, material payment, the reddish-silver bills almost no one used.

“Two hundred? It’s more than the last time.”

“It’s a matter of experience. You’ve been doing this long enough.” Golde shifted in her seat. “Not to mention that corporate espionage is a serious threat to Kourai’s bottom line. We’re happy to compensate you well if it means reclaiming proprietary information.”

“And returning stolen property.”

“Well, potato, po-tah-to.” Golde smiled, in her peculiar, glassy way — not insincere so much as uninvolved, like she couldn’t put more effort into it than was absolutely necessary. “You’re doing good work, Visha.”

“…thank you.”

“Oh, here we are.” The waiter poured a reasonable dram of the Houraisen liquor into Golde’s glass, laid down her plate of sashimi, then gave Visha her somewhat larger platter, covered in raw fish and accoutrements which seemed eerily colorful against the monochrome bar: salmon pink, certainly, but also dark purple, shining silver, mild green, and a stark banana yellow. As per usual, it tasted about the same to Visha as conveyor belt sushi.

“How is your sake?”

“I don’t think I could explain it to you without also explaining how Japanese liquor in general is meant to taste.”

“That’s fair.”

“Back on topic, corporate wants me to ask you whether you’re still sure about the counselor.”

This was more familiar territory. “No need.”

“Even if it’s covered by work expenses?”

“I wouldn’t want to waste their time.”

“I mean, I’d at least consider it, Visha. Not to tell you your business, but troubleshooting is a line of work most people find at least a little worrying. If they know it exists.”

Visha set down her chopsticks and turned to look at Golde, who looked the same as ever: pale eyes without sentiment in a dark, slender face, and a well-tailored suit with the tacky glint of smart-material. There was no obvious accusation there, at least. “How so?”

“Well, we know you know wrights aren’t sentient, but…” Shifting uncomfortably, she managed to look fairly graceful while shrugging. “For most of our other troubleshooters, disabling machines that _look_ human can be stressful. That’s why we offer counseling in the first place.”

“Shouldn’t you be happy, then? Fewer costs and less risk of a meltdown?”

“Oh, I am — I don’t consider you at risk. Keep in mind I’m speaking on their behalf.”

“It’s not particularly stressful for me.” That earned her a mildly put-upon sigh.

“I think the question is… why?”

Visha considered it. There was no one reason why she was used to it, just a slow increase in tolerance through exposure, like medical interns and gore. It seemed like Golde needed an answer, though, so she decided on one. “It might have been the frame anatomy classes.”

“In training?”

“Yes. They brought in a disassembled wright frame…”

It had been two older models from Kourai’s early manufacturing line, back when they were still marketing strictly regulated animatronics, and the “wright” nickname hadn’t caught on yet. Apollo, the Adam-like “athletic masculine” model, was proportioned like a god, with copper-burnished skin, blond hair, and a king’s jaw. Visha had almost felt sick when they brought Apollo and Terra — the female counterpart, fit and athletic and springy — into the little demonstration room in boxes. Apollo’s eye had been cracked; it glinted dully in the fluorescents. She’d had to pry it out and almost vomited. But when they’d started stripping the skin off with a flensing knife, the pale yellow of the adhesive, a mushroom-flesh color, had somehow been calming; after that, she’d managed to finish without a fuss.

"I was watching the instructor carving open the seam and disassembling the feedback grips, discarding the skin and the servos and actuators, then showing us the central computing cluster, and I remember I thought, ‘ _Oh, that’s all they are_.’”

“Computing clusters, you mean?”

“No. I mean that I saw how much of the frame is designed to mimic humans, and how little space the brain takes up compared to a human brain. The haptic feedback and the gyros and the head speakers are all designed to create a convincing illusion.” Apollo’s skull had been off-gray, with no eyeballs at all. Wright “eyes” back then were bog-standard cameras, behind curved lenses that granted them depth via optical illusion. "It's special effects.”

“What do you mean?”

“By special effects?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Visha finished her last bite of the sushi whose name she didn’t remember. “Imagine that a film crew needs to shoot a scene in which a man is drinking at a bar. They could use real alcohol, but that would eventually take its toll on the actor if they finished in more than one or two takes. So instead, the props department mixes some dye and ice cubes into tap water, fakes condensation on the glass's rim, adjusts the lighting, et cetera, and produces stage gin. It doesn’t need to be real alcohol, because that isn’t relevant to what the audience sees. As long as it looks right, it does its job. If the props department is competent, it may even seem more authentic than the reality, while still being fake. And that’s what wrights are. They’re machines built to _look like_ real people, not to _be_ real people.”

“So when you disable them —“

“They don’t have convincing scripts for edge cases like that. If you can taste the stage gin, you can tell it’s just water and dye.”

“Hmm.”

There was a brief silence, during which the man at the counter topped off their drinks (sake for Golde, plain water for Visha).

“You’ve had movies on the brain recently. Thinking of shipping out to Hollywood, then?”

“If I seem that way, it’s because of this director, Amir Munir. They call him the arthouse slasher pioneer, I think it was? — I was watching a marathon last night, on channel 38, so I might be thinking cinematically.”

“I notice you haven’t answered my question.”

“Hollywood?”

“Though you’re more a stunt double type than an actress, I think.”

“I don’t know how I’m meant to take that.”  
  
“Any way you like. Certain you don’t want any sake?”

* * *

 

The air smelled like wet concrete, heat and trace ozone when she left, but the rain was thinner than usual. Visha held up one arm to shield herself, and flicked through her email with the other, pulling up Melville’s crime scene photos. There were seven shots, each a little bit grainier than the official photos, but not so much as to ruin them. Apparently, Melville’s “contact” on the force used a camera the size and shape of a silver dollar for these clandestine shots. 

The official release had been antiseptic, but these throbbed with cinematic power: a slender thigh at a profane angle, with the bone exposed, or at least some SFX substitute. Hair matted to the skull by dark dry fake blood. A hand, its lo-res fingernails harsh and visible from rigor mortis, its fingers splayed. An honest-to-god tooth lying nearby. While she walked, only vaguely considering traffic, she flicked through those seven shots over and over, admiring the shot composition, the angles, the squalid morning light like a deranged necrophiliac cousin to the Golden Hour. She was fixated. Fuck decency: here was art pinned to dead pixels. Even after she’d looked through them all to her present satisfaction and gotten back to walking, Visha couldn’t get them out of her brain. 

In death, Annabel was different. Less bland, maybe. But that was a matter of photography. Despite the brutality, enough had been preserved to recognize her face. In fact, there was a way the camera scanned what remained that suggested the missing anatomy, the way a marble stump might suggest a pillar. The eye was drawn from cheekbones to the phantom cast of her temples, caved in by an unidentified blunt implement. Then, from there, it could trace dark stains to a snapped neck and imagine the swanlike arch from the way the head hung down. 

From the shadows cast by the camera eye, one could undo Annabel's execution. Visha could see the exposed pale femur recede and turn like a key, forcing the devastated architecture of bones inside the leg to lock together; by the end it would have an almost balletic shapeliness. Still fingers moved and gripped at the air, every joint thrown into stark relief. They’d managed a faint discoloration, from when they’d cut her circulation off — injections of food coloring or dye, maybe? — but the ample blood supply would take care of that, returning to her veins and restarting a damaged heart. 

Even the head could be restored, starting with the reset neck and working its way up through the jaw, where a gentle hand could set the deserter tooth back in its place. From there, Visha could watch the sunken temples rise again, feel the gentle fall of hair rinsed and renewed, see peaceful eyes with dark liquid irises — a whole ruined body made factory fresh. Annabel in death was Laura Palmer and the Virgin Mary. That was sheer _mono no aware_  — a pure, perfect and mortal life snuffed so recently that even with her shit phone resolution she could practically _taste_ it.  

Once you did, while it was fresh in your mind, it was undeniable, raw and everywhere. The echo of Annabel’s Marian face was there in a unsmiling FCED wright’s features as Visha passed her on her way down a flight of stairs. From the walkway at the top, looking down, she watched that wright’s legs and recognized the way they’d been broken on Annabel. Not that Visha herself could replicate it with just that. As a troubleshooter, she could tell you where the actuators and joints were in normal mechanical limbs, could snap or unfasten them as necessary with time and a Swiss army knife. Only the Pygmalion Killer could break a wright's bones. And the fact of it — the beauty of it — was that  _none of it was real_. Wrights’ skulls were almost solid masses of steel; anyone could tell you that if they’d rapped on one. She’d seen their “bones,” and those were just pistons and springs and complex actuators for fake muscle mass. Their skin tones came from the rubber casing wrapped around their actual arms, with zero liquid content. Everything was fake. But the Pygmalion Killer took that empty metal chassis and beat a raw, shrieking final moment into the past that forced your brain to spin to life.

Visha smiled, looking out over rooftops and pavements, idly watching the FCED wright she’d passed standing at an intersection and imagining stripping and dismantling her, a real-life exploded diagram. Maybe she’d take her time with the next troubleshooting job, examine the servos of the neck, swiveling as the wright checked for cars at an intersection. Or examine thin, fine hands. Or… and it struck Visha then that there was something else drawing her eye to the FCED enforcer. Some weirdness in her proportions, maybe. She leaned over the railing to look more closely — which was when the wright turned her neck in one economical motion, and stared straight at her with eyes lit up fluorescent warning red.

Visha started and almost tripped over the railing — feeling a sudden rush of vertigo at the sight of pavement — then groped for the safety bar for a second too long to feel comfortable. Unbalanced, she found purchase with two fingers and gripped with the rest, and that let her cantilever back onto her feet to look up and confirm that it was still staring. Her hand went to her baton holster. Red meant it was going to immediately suppress the threat — had this one been carrying a firearm? Underneath the streetlight, her angle of vision made it into a silhouette, and the loose shape at its hip didn’t resemble anything. She stepped back a little. Not that there was any cover available. Either it would shoot at her, in which case there would be no recourse except running like hell, or it would chase her, in which case ditto. So as soon as it moved, so would she.

The wright blinked. After a pause of a few seconds, it smiled. Or, at least, its teeth showed, lines of torsion contorting the stiff features of its face and pulling the skin taut across the skull. Points of articulation stood out underneath. It would have been a hideous leer if the smile itself, straining the skin, wasn’t so humorless and unplaceable, or if the eyes revealed anything at all but LEDs. But as it was, it was an artificial expression, something human transcribed so badly into servomotor code that it was pure visual noise. It stayed that way, looking her over, for a few timeless seconds, before the stretched expression reverted to the dull neutrality of law enforcement, the wright turning its eyes down towards the pavement. Like an afterthought, the red warning lights shut off, and she (in motion she seemed like a person again) crossed the street, vanished behind a building and was gone. 

Being a professional, Visha did not fall to her knees, but the tension left her dazed enough to stagger a little. She leaned on the railing. Part of her told her to pursue it. Part of her told her to file a report and go home. A more central fraction of her wanted to smoke, so she polished off the Sirens and steadied her hands.

After a while, she went home.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short one this time. Don't worry -- the next will be longer.

There was a message from management waiting in the morning, couched in carefully neutral language. In two days, her presence was requested for a team-building exercise at the Electra Hotel, where she’d be working with other consultants to improve her lateral thinking skills. Being a consultant only in a very specialized sense of the word, bordering on the euphemistic, she knew it meant another job. Which was worrying. They didn’t usually come so quickly; jailbreaking a wright into fleeing Moon Island, carrying its stolen payload of corporate and technological secrets, would presumably involve a lot of planning, not to mention overcoming Kourai Robotics’s software encryption. R&D estimated the number of people capable of doing it reliably at around eight, and three of those eight worked for Kourai already.

And the hacked wrights were _never_ FCED. Being able to use violence meant they were the most strictly regulated and closely monitored infrastructure in the city, with nightly compliance checks at registered maintenance centers. But Visha couldn’t imagine any other explanation for what she'd seen. How else could it have recognized her? Why else would it have gone into enforcement mode and not followed through? That robotic face, twisting and bulging metal actuators trying to portray some unknown idea, couldn’t have been a mechanical defect. Which didn’t leave any options except “deliberate design” and “waking nightmare,” and Visha trusted her senses.

But speculation would serve her very little. The Hotel Electra would reveal everything. In the meantime, she was sitting at her desk with a thin sandwich — strawberry jam and turkey on rye, soggy — and trawling the Kafé Kafka Forums. She’d polished off the new posts in the Pygmalion Killer thread a while ago. Most of them were half-baked theories about the Killer’s identity, or blurry silhouettes ripped from the gas station’s CCTVs. They were the work of devotees, mostly, people who’d been following the trail of bodies for months, with a canon of thinkers and theories; the rest of the forum had given up on the Killer, and denounced the discussion as lowbrow voyeurism. So news moved slow. A few new posts, though; she opened the thread and checked.

Nothing of value had been posted. Just another argument about property damage and what the message was supposed to be, flavored with political arguments of no particular worth or consideration. Moon Island was a complex subject, and that meant pointless political squabbles were common in the thread. Off-topic wastes of her time, in other words. Idly, Visha scanned usernames. Septic insults, posturing… libertarians using the word “gulag” and communists using the word “technocrat,” or possibly vice-versa. And among them, she noticed the handle Zappa, remembered Melville’s nemesis, or one of her nemeses. She had to admit, it made her curious.

Zappa, as it happened, was responsible for about eight new posts. Visha read through the most recent, on usage of PMCs by local corporations. It was coherent enough to read aloud, so she tried a few passages out, trying to imagine them spoken. It was a habit she’d picked up in school. The voice she chose was oratorial, if a little sharp.

“Kourai has, to my mind, reached escape velocity for the collapse of late capitalism. Per the accelerationist argument, concentration of wealth and enfranchisement on this level means increased worker dissatisfaction. Buyout of indigenous governments, etc. ditto.” 

(Here she looked up accelerationist and spent an instructive ten minutes on Wikipedia.) 

“But Kourai Robotics has wrights: as competent and smart as any factory worker, but low-maintenance, relatively cheap to manufacture and perfectly loyal. And its location in international waters, combined with its wealth, guarantees total sovereignty from regulation; not technically a government, it cannot be sanctioned economically unless those powers admit its functional chokehold on Moon Island governance, and no one country is willing to forsake Kourai science and product for the world’s long-term interests.”

“In other words, Kourai is beholden to _no one_ but its stockholders, and they show no signs of optimizing towards anything but profit. This is a guarantee of power incomparable to any in modernity; I can guarantee you that if a post-apocalyptic scenario should come in our lifetimes, while we scrounge for gasoline, bullets and clean water, the warlords will be swearing fealty to the Kourai crown.”

“And, of course, its work now — constructing minds for the explicit purpose of infinite, mandatory service with no compensation — is inimical to anyone with an ounce of moral sense. Hence, the only solution is force.”

There followed a description of the force. The primary element would be explosives — suitcase bombs, Molotov cocktails, dirty bombs, followed by paramilitary intervention. None of it was specific enough for anyone to accuse it of being a plan. It didn’t linger, either, on the carnage. The tone was not exactly wistful, but more nostalgic, to Visha’s eye. Like, _remember when we could have killed these men with a gun and a dream and no risk of civilian casualties?_

A few posts down, Melville — username _sailor_melville_ , which was some kind of obscure joke about old anime — had replied to Zappa’s diatribe with a somewhat buried lede of an argument, most of the rest being devoted to insults. This one, Visha didn’t read. Zappa’s presumptive voice had made her throat hurt.

“Check your sources. _Read_ your sources even. B/c fun fact: wrights aren’t people-level smart. It’s in the freaking acronym. Wright as in RIGHT as in **r** estricted **i** ntelligence **g** rowth **h** eavy anima **t** ronic as in fail-deadly verification checks on response maps that kill anything that starts to resemble a brain. As in there are human-instigated daily checks _for those checks_. It’s just complex maps of conversations plus baked-in motor responses. Passing the Turing test ≠ being a person, quit Pinocchio concern trolling all threads.”

“Do you seriously believe a multinational corporation would keep actual literal slaves _in public_ and not get investigated? Is your worldview seriously that reliant on everyone being absurd caricature sociopaths. And the rest: they’re a robot manufacturer. Google is still richer. If you want to try coming up with a convincing account of your technocracy shtick don’t say the reptilians in charge of the government are what proves it next time.”

The comments were predictably split and aggressive. Zero content. Visha closed the window and resigned herself to an early sleep.

* * *

At night — that night, and all the others — Moon Island discolored the surface of the water.

The sky was already pregnant with it. Day or night, the metropolitan center operated in electric ecstasy twenty-four-seven, transfiguring the filament sky so black became light-pollution sepia, until the horizon drew in claustrophobically close. The stars were gone, or at least unnecessary. Only the moon clung to the flat sky, and lost something for its tenacity, becoming less light and more eyeball. And beneath that eye, the ocean also drew closer, fuzzy brown like the sky, and too still. There was a suggestion of no space and no time. Muggy heat pressurized everything.

Under the sun, power had many forms: manpower, intelligence, equipment, expectations. But at night, when the moon’s unclean gaze bleached everything, power was only light. The lightning streets were striped white-blue, and the skyscrapers were gold and brass and glass like obsidian, sometimes advertising Coke or summer blockbusters, achingly high-res. Between the high towers and the surface of the city, sushi bars and expensive Indian takeaway places and sleek apartment buildings. Looking anywhere, seeing anything, invited a kind of drunken blindness which made necessary the use of a self-driving car. The settled regions of the island, and Mt. Kaguya beyond, were a black hulk, but the skyscrapers were sharp, a torch against the tight-knit deoxygenated backdrop they made.

At street level, drawing back from the bird’s-eye view, dark shapes occasionally crossed through, in cars or on foot. Not many. Even for a city of this size, surrounded by rotting infrastructure abandoned by residents surplus to requirements. Not many left. And among them, obvious thanks to their seamed backs and necks — which is to say, exactly as invisible as anyone else — were wrights. Restricted intelligence growth heavy animatronics, running messages, or doing surveillance, or working quiet, necessary jobs.

The Electra Hotel was as close to a center of culture as the island had. Its light was understated, alcoholic gold, with ballrooms, balconies, hanging gardens, the last spasm of an architect tired of modernity. It pretended, very capably, at years of history. A suite cost amounts so exorbitant they were abstract. The name was, as far as anyone could tell, completely meaningless to everyone but the owner.

In the rooftop suite of the Electra Hotel, the king of Moon Island smiled.

The right people, on the right set, with the right light.

The night — that night, and all the others — was going to be beautiful.


	4. Chapter 4

It was always strange, visiting the Hotel Electra on business. For one thing, the need to keep a low profile meant there was a de facto dress code. If there was a party going on — and there almost always was — incognito meant the one nice dress she owned. It was dark gold trim on a faintly oily black fabric, backless, but otherwise unrevealing, and utilitarian enough to walk in. Still, it made her feel naked, leaving the lines of her neck exposed, and she couldn’t carry her baton.

And the aesthetic choices that had gone into the Hotel itself were outside her comfort zone. From a city of clean, rounded lines and smooth surfaces, she stepped to dark carpets, then to iridescent tile patterned with spirographs. Two sets of stairs, the banisters cast in mahogany, drew the eye to railed balconies and the chandelier, hanging heavy and pregnant like a jeweled chrysalis. All around she could see powerful, attractive men and women in well-tailored formalwear, smiling at each other like they didn’t have day jobs. All of them seated at two-person tables with small, glistening drinks, or standing in crowds and chatting. They were attended to by waiters so swift and unassuming as to be ghostlike; the waiters’ high collars made it impossible to tell whether they were human or not, though they seemed too efficient to her to be anything but wrights. It was almost anachronistic, relics of the economic ancien régime’s tastes.

A few sets of eyes tracked Visha as she crossed the room. It was likely that their interest was in her dress — black and gold were in fashion among the Moon Island nouveau riche — but she kept her head down anyway, defaulting, in lieu of any other script, to getting in and out as fast as possible. After asking for directions at the front desk, she located an elevator, and asked the attendant for the eighth floor. On the way up, she reviewed the situation: the “consultation” would take place in a small indoor garden adjacent to the Cathedral Ballroom. To avoid attention, she and the other troubleshooters in attendance would pretend to be there for the party taking place in said ballroom, a Kourai charity event for medical intervention in urban centers. That meant standing around, having a light meal of hor d’oeuvres, and light, evasive socialization, until it was time. After the meeting, she’d be free to go home and change back into comfortable clothes, with complete skin coverage. But no matter how she sliced it, tonight would not be particularly pleasant.

After a whisper-quiet ascent, the elevator doors opened onto the hotel proper, a long corridor lit by warm wall sconces. A small group had been waiting for the elevator, all event attendees, judging by their suits. She stepped to the side and let them pass, exchanging nods. Like her, they were wearing gold on black. Once they’d left, she followed the hall in the direction they’d come from.

After that, Visha followed the faint sound of distant piano down a side corridor to the doors of the Cathedral Ballroom. Another hotel employee was standing nearby with a clipboard; at her approach, he turned to face her. “May I ask your name, ma’am?”

“Visha Vogel.”

He consulted the clipboard, then nodded. “I see you don’t have a coat. May I check anything for you?”

No one would wear a coat in the heat, obviously, but it was the principle of the thing. “I don’t.”

“Then please proceed.” He opened the ballroom doors, and Visha entered the warm, heavy atmosphere of the Cathedral Ballroom.

True to the name, it was enormous, all one chamber beneath a vaulted dome with a _Phantom of the Opera_ -scale chandelier at the apex. Beyond the arched columns and the crowds, dancing and chatting in low voices, the far wall was all high, dark windows overlooking the Moon Island cityscape. Through those windows, by some trick of the angle, the lights became jagged, electrical, luminous shards embedded in the glass. Light, sourceless classical music carried through the air.

“Stunning, hey?”

Visha blinked, then turned towards the voice. “Pardon?” 

The source was a man by the door with a sketchy little half-beard. He shrank a little at her direct eye contact, but rallied admirably. “The cathedral. The stained glass. Well, of course, not an actual cathedral, but architecturally, structurally, very similar. With an authentic illumination of the resurrection of Lazarus in the window. A designer recruited from Vatican City, nonetheless.”

“Was it?” The scene in the window was abstract, not Biblical in her understanding of the term. All she could see was Moon Island, bright and bizarre. Still, there was an opportunity for small talk here. “I didn’t think they were still building cathedrals in Vatican City.”

“I — of course they are. It’s the single most Catholic city on Earth. City-state.”

“Well, yes. Vatican City was built to serve Catholics. I assumed they would have enough for their entire population.”

The man opened his mouth, then shut it. “Well. Honestly, I hadn’t thought it through that far. It would make a certain amount of sense for him to be studying the greats.”

“Hmm,” said Visha, noncommittally.

“So, what’s your line of work?” The man in the suit held up a hand before she could answer. “Actually, let me guess — and don’t, incidentally, tell me if I’m right or wrong, I just want to figure that out gradually. Verify my thinking. You’re… an investor in Shelhart Medical Solutions. No — an engineer. In the prosthetics line.”

“How so?”

“Oh, your arms, first and foremost. The general muscle tone. Prosthetists who don’t themselves wear prosthetic arms tend to be fit, which sounds paradoxical at first blush, but that’s how it is.”

“Is that so.”

“After all, we don’t have blue collar types around here. And you’re not a wright, I’m assuming? You can tell me that one.”

“I’m human.”

“Then you’re a health and fitness enthusiast, and that means either prosthetics or some related field. Maybe neurology, I’ve been hearing about strides in direct nervous grafting and artificial skin lately — I could see you doing clinical trials. Or, long shot, cardiology? I’ve heard this wine is designed to improve heart function overall.”

“All from some muscle? Isn’t that extreme?”

“Outside the realm of science, I prefer to trust my intuitions. Which is bad practice, I know, but I learn by doing.” With a quick, curving movement, the man turned and raised a hand, flagging over a few other attendees, some also in oily black trimmed with gold, others in more traditional red, emerald and penguin-black. “Rich, Parvati, Arc, I’d like to introduce you to a new friend of mine, a — moment of truth, you’re a…?”

“She’s evidence you need to reconsider this profiling kick, Jer,” said Parvati.

“I’m a financial consultant for Kourai.”

“See? Not even close.”

“Damn,” said Jer (Jerry?).

“Though I notice you’re not so dazed as most of his test subjects, miss, uh…?”

“Visha.”

“Is that Russian?” asked Rich.

“Possibly. I’ve never been asked.”

“I think it might be Hindi, actually,” said Arc.

Jer laughed a little. “It’s got that ring to it!” 

She spent the next hour or so mingling. It was easier than she’d expected; for all the glitz, the event was mostly technical types there to present a face to the public: startup founders, Ph.Ds and the new optimistic rich. Unused to actual glamor, they defaulted to a general absent-minded geniality. By virtue of dressing well, she became part of the same category they figured themselves in, and ended up at the edge of a number of conversations.

Happy to be dull, she allowed her mind to drift. It was easy; something about the atmosphere made her feel half absent already. While someone was talking about self-driving vehicles, she stared into the middle distance out the windows, tried to see Lazarus in the abstract angles. Closer to the window, like she was, the city itself was mostly out of frame. Most of what she could see was just black, marred by a small, resentful moon alone in the sky. On the other side of her, there was babbling, laughter, a small cluster of older men talking in hushed voices. All with the music floating over it, fantastic auditory hallucinations. Was it live?

Her watch read 9:38. Twenty minutes left. The garden was a few minutes’ walk from the ballroom. She turned and —

“What do you think, Visha?”

It was one of the anonymous partygoers, this one likely Jer, though a lot of them were kind of interchangeably wry and excitable. She tried to remember the question and got nothing but fog. “Pardon?” she said, on the grounds that it was a good all-purpose response.

“About the governance issue.”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t been sleeping well. Could you —?” 

“Hey, don’t worry about it. Though I could recommend some coffee supplements — chewable supplements, Marc’s design, moderate side effects but you can drag forty-eight hours at peak function out of it — no? Okay.” He shrugged. “We’ve been talking about island government. The whole diplomatic situation with the states, considering we’re not technically a state, and the, y’know, the standard outrage over the economic situation. The emigration. Et cetera.”

“Go on.”

“Now, the emigration — by my way of thinking, we provided avenues of relocation basically for free, basically paying out of pocket for these unrelated people, and then we get called modern Andrew Jacksons — ‘imperialists’ — when the U.S. wouldn’t take them, like doing something is _worse_ than doing nothing. And on top of that, we provide roads, maintenance and policing for what are basically ghost towns just so we can’t be called robber barons. And we still get no credit.” Jer grinned, a little sheepishly, a mollifying kind of grin.

At that, a woman sucked down the dregs of some attractive macrobiotic liquor and glared at Jer. “Seriously. You’re misquoting me _again_ , Jeremy?” It didn’t quite sound like a question.

Jeremy raised his hands. “Parvati, I recall your exact statement here, and it did involve the phrase ‘robber barons.’ Your words.”

“That was a _quote_.” Parvati put her head in her hands, a little theatrically, to Visha’s mind. “You’ll Godwin us next."

“Ah, you wound me!” Watching Jeremy mime an arrow to the heart, Visha strongly contemplated excusing herself to a balcony and burning through her remaining half-pack of Sirens. It would make her smell like smoke, which would be memorable. That was probably unacceptable.

“But, in all seriousness,” continued Jeremy, “I know my company, at least, is trying to work out a better policy — end the money sink in a way that benefits everyone. And I think we do that by offering locals _positions_ — get them in hotels as consultants and bulldoze the land. Whereas Parvati —“

“Can speak for herself, thank you, and I’m saying reparations are both ethically and tactically superior —“ As they got back into it, gesturing in their power and vague anger, she began drifting away from them. She had twelve minutes, at a leisurely pace.

“Actually,” piped up another face, interrupting, “I’ve always thought that that wright vandal had something to do with the protests.”

“How so?”

“Well… it’s typical misguided protest tactics, isn’t it? Vandalism, wrapped up in fake gore for cheap, meaningless shock value.” The anonymous party permitted herself a giggle. “It all just seems gauche, I suppose. Is it pretentious I’m saying that? _Gauche_?”

Before anyone else could take a breath, Visha turned back to them. “It’s not that simple.”

“But doesn’t it seem —“

“Whether they’re protest is debatable, but they’re not meaningless. It’s a shallow response.”

The woman who had spoken was smiling, but it was the lidded, uneasy smile of someone who wasn’t sure whether you understood the rules of debate. “Does it actually deserve more than shallow, do you think?”

“If you want to understand, yes.”

“What’s there to understand, then?”

“It’s a —“ That came out almost sharp, unpalatable to this company and her tongue. Visha caught herself before she could finish the sentence. “It’s — meant to be art.”

“Art. But not _real_ art. Splatterhouse satire is still splatterhouse.”

There was nothing to say to that, or at least nothing that Visha could say with the time she had. She bowed her head a little, imitating deference, and kept her headache out of her face. “…I’m sorry, but I have somewhere to be.”

Per her expectations, no one said goodbye.

* * *

In better circumstances, the garden might have been a place of respite. The greenery was heavy, if clean, imported from temperate regions, thermoregulated and kept fresh by finely-tuned mechanisms. The chairs, dark angular wood, were surrounded by hellebores, irises and a third flower, a soothing blue with darker streaks. And it had a nice freshly-watered smell, clean without being antiseptic.

As it was, though, the garden terrace was just claustrophobic, since its windows opened onto a sky the color of rancid coffee with milk, or lightly burnt steak. The change from the surrealism of the Cathedral Ballroom to the flat-sky garden was drastic enough that Visha found it difficult to look anywhere but down at her hands — and still felt a headache starting to swell. Sitting across from her, Golde slid Visha a shortbread cookie, who dipped it in her tea with one hand and massaged a temple with another. “Don’t get your hopes up for quality. These are the mass-produced kind.”

“Really?”

“Twelve to a pack, manufactured on the mainland. Short notice, I think. The tea might be more to your taste.”

The difference in flavor wasn’t actually evident to her, though that might have been a happy accident from the dipping. “My, ah, tastes aren’t so refined.”

“Well, you’ve proven _that_ with your tastes in seafood.”

“I suppose I can admit to that. My diet hasn’t been very varied since I started living here — certainly too many eggs —“

But Golde wasn’t looking at her any more. Visha revolved in her chair and saw that a figure was standing at the gate, hand raised to knock. It was a tall man in a suit, likewise oil-black with gold in the breast pocket and lining, with bright gilt buttons. That suit had been tailored over a body which might have been skinny-sharp and hence invisible or outsized and hidden. He was smiling with his teeth. In a perfectly normal voice, he asked “Weren’t we meeting at eleven?”

“You’re right on time, as a matter of fact.” said Golde. “Visha’s just early. Visha, I’d like to introduce you to Thaddeus Flagg, troubleshooter; Thaddeus, this is Visha Vogel, in the same line of business.” Visha, who had never met any of her coworkers besides Golde, nodded mutely, unable to think of a greeting that wouldn’t show her immediate, instinctive distaste for Thaddeus Flagg, like a psychic nausea.

“It’s a pleasure, miss Vogel.” Unprompted, he sat down at the table, across from Visha, and poured himself about half a ceramic mug. “Is it too early to ask what exactly we’re here to discuss?”

“I’d rather wait for the rest,” Golde said.

“What do you mean?” asked Visha.

Golde nodded. “This particular target might present some difficulties. So we’re bringing you all on board.”

“Oh.” She’d known, on an intellectual level, that she wasn’t Kourai’s only employee in this department. Her nighttime hunting trips just hadn’t ever involved direct human interaction. Preprogrammed destinations for the self-driving car, company wrights to dispose of the carcasses in some anonymous island barrens warehouse… and Golde, once in a while, who seemed more like a colleague from a different department, or some kind of mission control, than anything.

Looking at Visha, Thaddeus smiled again. “So, how long have you been in this business?”

“…since day one, more or less.”

“You’re a veteran, then! I’ve only been here a year or so. Myself, I’m on loan from a PMC on the mainland. Covert ops and intelligence work.” That — _grin_ was too clever, _smirk_ was too harsh, anything but _smile_ involved implicit judgment of a smarm that might have just been in her mind — wouldn’t go away. “It’s been nice, getting away from actual combat for once. Like a tropical vacation!”

“You’ll get used to the weather, I imagine.” The shortbread cookies were, on review, actually pretty good. Nibbling at one and nursing her black tea, wishing she had some kind of sweetener, Visha watched the gate, looking at a point near Thaddeus Flagg’s shoulder.

“Hope I don’t stop _enjoying_ it, at least.”

After they'd sustained a few minutes of idle conversation with about the same tone, more expected guests showed up. A grim older man, so wrinkled that he must have been salt-pickled, walking with a thin, segmented cane; he said his name was Julius and offered little else. A couple arriving simultaneously, two muscular women in suits, Cindy stout, Sal about average height. A gawky girl, younger than Visha or anyone else there, who introduced herself as “La Chupacabra” with no visible irony. All in the exact same ink-black-with-gold-trim color scheme. Kourai was oddly insistent on branding, or else it only had one kind of formalwear to rent out.

Golde clapped her hands, kind of sounding like a kindergarten teacher. “I see we’re all here. Needless to say, this is provided for in your NDAs, so ask any questions now and confine your discussion to secure channels. Yes?” Most of the assembly nodded. “Yes. We’ll be providing dossiers, but they’re not extensive, so you might as well commit as much as you can to memory.” La Chupacabra raised her hand. “Riley?”

 

“Um — okay,” said la Chupacabra, in a voice like she was spinning up her nerve. “I don’t think it’s plausible to track a rogue gone to ground outside the city center quickly if I don’t know what parts of the surveillance camera logs are, uh. Relevant. Are surveillance camera logs included?”

“It’s more a lack of intel than classified material,” Golde said. “But I’ll get to that soon. Now — I know that at least one of you has been tracking the story of the so-called ‘Pygmalion Killer.’” She nodded at Visha. “For those not in the know, it’s a name the media has assigned to an unidentified serial vandal and terrorist. They’re known for disabling wrights and using the bodies to construct tableaux meant to resemble real murdered humans. So far, island-wide security footage and FCED wrights have failed to capture any images of the Killer, despite the recent radical upgrades to city center CCTVs and expanded FCED patrol routes.”

“Been hearing a lot of clamor for security, of late,” Julius said. 

“That’s precisely our point,” said Golde. “The public response to the Killer has involved demand for better security islandwide, and, as it happens, you and your typical wright targets are at risk of being caught by the same net. Kourai has been withholding surveillance logs for years; the other charter companies haven’t complained or invoked the charter because we — which is to say, you — handle all wright losses internally and at no cost to them. Not to mention that we field a very effective team, and so there’s not much footage to cut.” 

“But with this sensationalism in the news, there’s political pressure on them to hunt the Killer down. Weingarten Security Solutions in particular has been pressing us for the excised footage, installing further cameras and demanding deployment of FCED wrights, forcing us to cover up even more…” Golde sighed. “It’s a vicious cycle.”

“And I’m guessing that if the public knows wright encryption isn’t airtight, it’ll undermine their trust in us?” Flagg cut in.

La Chupacabra scowled. “Another Luddite Skynet panic scenario. Set back the technology actual years, just because everyone’s afraid of killer robot overlords.” Visha slid her a sympathetic shortbread cookie, and she picked it up and started gnawing on it.

“Exactly right. And, of course, any serious loss of trust in the utility of wrights would decimate our profits. There might even be a response from mainland governments — tariffs or embargoes on the technology, which would be a death sentence for Kourai Robotics, and quite possibly Moon Island itself.” Fixing them with a look, Golde gestured to the assembly. “As such, we’ve decided to mobilize you all, to cut off the issue at the root, so to speak.”

Visha’s breath caught in her throat, but she cleared it with a gulp of tea. She raised her voice. “How are we meant to cut off a social phenomenon?”

“Simple,” said Golde. Visha had sometimes seen her playful, but the sweeping gesture she made was more theatrical than anything, a midnight television hostess introducing the evening’s entertainment. Laid out against the haze of the sky, her hand offered up an arc of land, silhouetted against the flat water — the skyscrapers, scaffolded by deep blue, magenta and gold, and beyond those lights, the hallucinatory light field scattered, became more like Christmas lights, then thin, pale squares, terminating entirely at the foot of Mt. Kaguya, its necklace of factories and nameless facilities invisible against its bulk. From far above, at night, the abandoned city was a phantom forest, and the light was so, so small. “We’re going to hunt down the Pygmalion killer and end their spree, permanently.”

Visha felt that that deserved more shock than it received. The rest of the troubleshooters remained steady, more or less. La Chupacabra leaned forward in her seat, not blinking, but she’d already had an unblinking kind of face. Flagg nodded like he’d expected it. Sal and Cindy exchanged looks. Julius didn’t seem to care.

“This target will be somewhat more involved. Considering our lack of intel, we’re going to be relying on all of you to do reconnaissance work — tracking, legwork inside and outside the city center, heuristic analysis, et cetera. Expect long nights, for which you will be compensated appropriately.”

“You have any actual leads for us, or are we flying blind, here?” Cindy asked.

“Unfortunately, we’re primarily operating on rumors.” Golde shrugged. “To start, we’d like you to investigate the scene of the Killer’s most recent crime, since our access to investigative material is limited. The wright damaged was an inexpensive model — I believe it was operating a gas station owned by the Varga Oil Company, catering mostly to tourists and investors who bring their traditionally fueled vehicles from the mainland.”

“An Annabel.”

“I’m sorry, but who is…?” Flagg said.

“The model. Wrights of the same model all respond to a single name; the Varga victim was an Annabel. I’ve seen her enough to remember it because the station is within walking distance of my apartment.”

“You’ve come prepared,” said Golde, giving her an approving look. “Now, I’m sure you all have questions…?”

It seemed the time, so Visha spoke up. “I saw a FCED wright a few nights ago which seemed to have been hacked. How are we going to deal with those cases?”

“That’s… worrying, if true. What happened, exactly?”

“Its eyes lit up red when it saw me, but it didn’t attack. I think it was trying to smile.” Albeit contorted into a shape that had only the barest genealogical relation to any kind of smile, with a muscle structure distended like the Bride of Frankenstein. “For a given value of trying.”

“Then I’ll trust your judgment and send Julius as soon as possible. Julius, I assume you’re amenable?” A grunt of assent emerged from Julius’s begrudging throat. “We don’t need a full ensemble for minor investigations, after all. Though if it was FCED, you might bring firearms.”

“And if this is not, in fact, a snipe hunt, and we catch up to the lunatic?” said Cindy.

“Then we subdue them, declare their identity publicly and let the charter sort things out.” Visha bit into her cookie and tasted something like ash in the vanilla. “Our long national nightmare will have a nice, clean ending.”

* * *

 There was more — logistics, planning, exchanging phone numbers — which took less than an hour, all told. In the end, they broke off in small groups, to minimize suspicion. La Chupacabra, Sal and Cindy were first, the former reaching to stick her hands in pockets she didn’t have, the latter two reviewing the data in hushed voices. Then Julius. Golde took the elevator across from Visha and Flagg — she was heading upwards, to her air-conditioned chambers in the vaults of the Electra, and they were heading back to street level, heat and neon and headaches. All of which Visha could tolerate. Less so Flagg, a foot away, in an elevator that was only roomy for an elevator. Cheery, genial, deeply and continuously normal. Modulated, maybe.

“A bona-fide serial killer, huh!”

“In name only. They’re more a…” _Vandal_ felt wrong, underwhelming. _Artist_ wouldn’t fly. “Graffitist is more accurate.”

“Like taggers… Hmm. I guess ‘killer’ _is_ just a nickname, but it’s still exciting!”

“It’s worrying. The Killer’s identity is a cipher, and we’re meant to pursue them with little actual evidence.”

“Eh. Cipher or not, you keep making scenes like that, you get found eventually.”

“I’m also unsure I understand how this is ‘exciting.’”

“Well, I’ve made my peace with having a job doing violence, more or less, but it’s nice knowing violence is the exact right thing to do, y’know?”

“What you want is not to deal with moral ambiguity.”

“Exactly! _Exactly_. Got my orders, got my direction, so I stop the killer, get paid and restore peace, all in one go.”

“Hmm.”

There followed a pause not interrupted by the whisper of the elevator. It seemed to Visha that there had been fewer floors coming up.

“You know,” said Flagg, and there was a spike of reverence — a hint of the American Midwest — in his otherwise perfectly average voice, “I came here thinking this island would be like… Disneyland. Saw it on TV. Impossible to mistake, if you’ve ever seen the Electrical Parade, and I was just _fascinated_. When they were looking for a long-term assignment here, I volunteered straightaway, just so I could see it all in person. Didn’t take to corporate espionage too well, but I’ve adjusted.”

“The Electrical Parade?” Visha had seen footage before, but the Parade was meant to amaze — hence the radiant colors, like each car and carriage was trailing a comet’s-tail of fireworks. Moon Island just glared. As far as she could remember, that was all it had done, was glare. “A fantastical analogy.”

He didn’t appear to have heard her. “And now, seeing it in person, living here…” 

“You changed your —“

“I was _absolutely right_!” Flagg’s arm, sweeping through the air, nearly caught Visha in the face. “It’s _exactly_ like Disneyland. Or — no, a carnival! Like no one ever meant to _live_ here, just to visit, so they jammed it with all the pricey restaurants and tinsel and fireworks they wanted, and in the morning it still doesn’t go away.”

He was looking at her straight, like he expected something, so Visha tried to think of a response. “I don’t think that’s all that accurate. People live here. If it were a fake, it couldn’t last this long —“

“No, no, I never said _fake_! Now, Las Vegas, _that’s_ a fake. It’s got the neon and pyramids and a Sphinx, but when you’re a debt collector in Las Vegas you figure it out fast. It’s all bourbon and dirty alleyways and dirty needles and headache medication and regular people who need a reason to go to casinos. With glitz and glamour so no one looks too close. And I think it’s most of all Vegas marriages that break my heart, when you see a bride and groom all tipsy at the altar and you think to yourself, _they had to get drunk to get married_ , and in the morning there’ll be hangovers and bad breakfasts.”

There was no middle distance in the elevator, almost by definition, but Flagg’s eyes were still locked onto it. “Even Disneyland just makes money, after a fashion, and it still uses teenagers in Mickey Mouse heads to clean up the vomit. But this city is what Disneyland pretends it could be! Lights like you see in dreams, and honest-to-God ballrooms, and… and the wrights all really feel like they _mean_ it when they say your smile just makes their day…” He sighed, captivated by the scenery beyond the door. Then he turned back to Visha, just as the elevator _dinged_ for the lobby.

“This island is the world’s only _real_ fantasy kingdom, I think. A circus all year round. And I’m happy to work for the one true ringmaster.” Flagg’s teeth were stark in an actual grin this time, but too _much_ , a parody which he might’ve known was real, or, then again, not. With sudden clarity, Visha realized she was — on some gut level — not embarrassed by Thaddeus Flagg, not repulsed by his personality or that invisible current of ghost smarminess. She was, in some subcortical region of the brain, somewhere hooked straight to the spine, afraid of him, or disgusted by him, or both. “No matter _what_ it needs.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shorter this time. Please forgive this of me.

There were no stains. It was kind of disconcerting to recognize where scattered rubber ersatz brain-particulate had left skittering red streaks and yet not see even the faintest mark left behind. But it was raining heavily, rain being a universal evidence solvent, and Annabel’s husk was long gone to the forensic specialists and machinists, and so maybe it was to be expected.

There was an umbrella open near the streetlight where Annabel had been found, in friendly canary yellow. Underneath it, Visha quietly meditated on the smoker’s plight, viz., the availability of her chosen vice damn near everywhere on Earth, especially convenience stores. Just being near a gas station, even the upscale Moon Island kind where the aisles smelled like vanilla, brought it to mind. Not that her habit wasn’t almost kicked with six months of extremely infrequent smoking. But she was standing in a parking lot under an undersized yellow umbrella, staring at nothing and stressed to the blood vessel burst point, and so the idea of cigarettes insinuated itself into any plan she had for getting dry.

Not to mention that her assignment, photographing evidence, was not bearing fruit. The digital camera in her hand, a relative relic meant to defend its contents with an air gap, felt small, cold, angular and forlorn. She hadn’t taken any pictures yet; with the weather and her lacking experience in camerawork, every angle felt blurry, unfocused, capturing nothing about the scenario that wasn’t obvious to the naked eye. Visha was no genius profiler, for all that she knew the Killer’s inclinations; understanding a shot as mise en scéne, or a criticism of Giger, was useless in the context of investigation.

The rain spattered her coat; beneath it, she felt the onset of bone-deep sogginess. It seemed like a reasonable time to take a break and explore alternative strategies. She’d regroup with her coworkers, get one of those factory-manufactured bento boxes with the thick savory scent that you could practically aerosolize, convene, buy a pack of Sirens —

Visha shook the thought out of her head and turned away from the scene. The light of the convenience store was dreary behind thick rain, and the heat gave it all a muggy quality. As she stepped into the air-conditioned Varga station, stowing her umbrella in the rack, she wiped away sweat and rainwater with one jacket sleeve. From beneath it, she gave the store a look. Cindy was standing at the counter with three cardboard coffee mugs, two small (yet ornate!) plastic bento boxes and a pack of gum. Cherry, on the other hand, was standing at attention, giving Visha her full, anticipatory attention, exactly as eager as she always was. “Oh, hon, you’re _soaked_ — can I offer you a complimentary plastic rain poncho?”

“No thank you. I’ll just drink something hot.”

“Coming right up!”

“Also unnecessary, Cherry. I assume one of these is for me?”

"Oh!" Cherry put a hand up to her mouth, smiling. "Didn't know you two knew each other."

“Right,” said Cindy, looking at Visha. “Should be a marked lid. Plain black, just a little overbrewed, no cream no sugar. Prime _long night_ coffee.”

“Thank you. And I’d like a pack of unfiltered Sirens.”

“Aw, hon, that’s two packs in one week. Not relapsing on me?”

“I’ve been worse.”

“Even so —“

“It’s a little time-sensitive, Cherry.”

Customer service wrights weren’t equipped to sigh; by all accounts, quiet disapproval didn’t test well with focus groups. Cherry didn’t even give the impression that she would be sighing if she could. She was axiomatically incapable of doing that, while getting Visha’s cigarettes or otherwise, and so she wasn’t doing it as she nodded, turned to the racks of cigarettes and selected the correct brand, the skin around her seam pale. And it was _still_ irritating to watch.

“Here you go.”

“Thank you,” said Visha. "Have a pleasant night.” The Sirens were too comfortable a fit in her jacket’s breast pocket, so she took her coffee in hand to occupy it. Cindy by her side under her own umbrella, Visha unfurled her umbrella and stepped back out into the hot, rainy gloom. Somehow, walking back to the little circle cast by the streetlight felt claustrophobic.

Cindy gave the ground a once-over. “Anything of interest?”

“No remaining evidence, as far as I can tell. Though I’m having some difficulty seeing. Do you have a flashlight?”

Cindy crouched down and flicked on a flashlight, running the beam over the pale material of the lot’s surface, still smooth and mostly undamaged by parking. Then she crouched lower. _Hunched_ , really, demarcating a workspace for herself with the boundaries of her umbrella. It seemed clear she didn’t want to be intruded upon, so Visha started nursing her coffee, which tasted like some cousin of battery acid in its sheer bitterness.

“So,” said Cindy, raising the rim of her umbrella just a fraction, “Do you always call them by name?”

Visha tried to locate Cindy’s face, but it was still too low and too dark (beneath the umbrella, at least) to recognize a face. At a loss, she said “I’m not sure what it is you’re asking.”

“Wrights, I mean. You talked to that cashier girl like you had a relationship, when she’s — what, weeks old in that position? Maybe?”

“Yes. She introduced herself when we met.”

“I mean, they're robots. They treat you the same, whether you know what to call them or not.”

“Well, Cherry isn’t a difficult name to remember. And I buy snacks and cigarettes here, so I’m in often.”

“How’d you find out in the first place, though? What, did you ask? Or did it tell you unprompted?”

Visha wasn’t actually surprised to find she couldn’t say. It wasn’t a deficiency or a blind spot in her recollections — it just hadn’t seemed like a big deal. Until Cindy brought it up, anyway. Now, in the face of irregularity, she found herself wondering. Had there been a name tag involved? A conversation? Of course, Cherry had known her name from the day they’d met; wrights attending to a certain customer base kept service logs from their ancestors as a matter of course. As well as a cashier could ever know a semi-regular client with no interest in small talk, Cherry knew Visha Vogel (viz. Cherry knew her first name, that she smoked, and that she liked imported junk food). “No idea.”

“Bizarre.” Apparently content to leave it at that, Cindy stood back up. Her expression seemed vaguely wry. “We’ve got no evidence, by the by.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Unless parts of… what was her name?”

“Annabel.”

“Sure. Unless parts of Annabel smaller than a quarter are what we need. Rain plus time means more or less no dice on DNA testing. They’ll have to wait on the forensics on the body proper.”

“What about the bloodstains? Can we… analyze their make-up?”

“For what, exactly? S’not real blood. No identifying marks.”

“Well, we shouldn’t waste time on searching for nonexistent evidence, then.”

“I’m with you there,” said Cindy, shrugging. “’Least our man left me a souvenir.” The lamplight glinted dully off the little yellow-white thing, with a thin red strands hanging on; Visha felt her stomach turn seeing it, struck by something that went down like excitement but burned like nausea. Albeit on reasonable grounds, in that it was very clearly a tooth, or a prop tooth.

The image struck Visha. Then she realized why.

“…that’s not actually possible.”

“How do you mean?”

“That can’t possibly have come out of the victim’s mouth. Wright teeth are manufactured to look separate, but they’re all one mass, fused together. It’s an easier design to mass-produce, and it's sturdier.”

“So it’s fake. Or — faker than fake.”

“Part of the set design. It seems meant to improve the illusion of a real murder, and to draw the eye to a small detail which reinforces empathy for the destroyed body via imagined pain —”

“Then it’s actual _evidence_.”

“How so?”

“Well, if our boy is 3D printing his little props, we can catch anyone snapping up whatever it’s made of, which I don’t think is generic plastic mold. Glint’s wrong. And if he’s getting them made elsewhere, that’s _still_ a trail.” Cindy reached into her pocket and withdrew a small black plastic bag. She stowed the tooth with care and started walking off, briskly, Visha trailing behind her.

“Not materials analysis, then.”

“No. That’s more of a movie thing than anything.”

Together, they walked back through the storm and the blur, into the city’s pulsating heart.


	6. Chapter 6

Moon Island had a single college of relevance, Avalon Polytechnic; there were other, small institutions on the island, most defunct or only affordable for city center residents, but Avalon Polytechnic was king among them, a college of fantastically profitable esoterica. The campus was narrow, mostly fresh-cut grass as vivid as Astroturf, with bleach-bright footpaths carving through it. The classroom buildings, arrayed around the largest dorm in clumps, were pale, smooth and soft-edged, tapering slightly from the ground up, their surfaces broken only by round black windows. Solar arrays were visible on the rooftops. Slightly desperate wind farms caught on minor breezes, almost ticking, or looking like they should be ticking. It was an image transplanted from a specific breed of science fiction.

The dorm itself was different. Standing in its shadow, Visha recognized the same basic elements, the same carved ivory, and it aspired towards the heavens the way the other buildings did, but the limits of architecture or aesthetic had taken their toll. It was wide and irregular and tiered, each level shaped mostly like the classroom buildings but terminating abruptly in another level, like a visual stutter.It had regular rectangular windows. Someone had tried to introduce balconies, but they were too small, and the iron railings made them feel sinister. It was unsynchronized, and she wasn't sure how to feel about it.

She checked the note on her phone. La Chupacabra — “Riley Leta” was her full name — was in room 466 of the main dorm; per Golde’s request, she’d take up the tooth and ask her to do some research, compiling a dossier for further study. She’d been supplied a fake I.D. as “Jocelyn Leta,” Riley’s aunt. It was a functional plan, and it was no one else’s fault, she had to admit, that she felt so out of place. A cluster of students in white T-shirts and baseball caps passed by, laughing loudly. Their voices were too harsh for so early in the morning, and they were trampling the counterfeit grass, which felt cruel for reasons Visha couldn’t completely articulate.

The main lobby of the dorm was compensating hard for its exterior — soporifically clean, carpeted, faux-natural light lamps placed strategically to cover those areas that the actual natural light couldn’t. There were chrome elevator doors inset in the back wall, her obvious destination. A man in an unseasonable jacket sat at a desk near the door, smiling broadly and looking almost directly at her, while still evading the formal implications of actual eye contact. At Visha’s approach — she was looking elsewhere and trying to bypass him politely, apparently to no avail — he stood and smiled. “Can I help you?”

“Jocelyn. Leta,” said Visha, suppressing the urge to show ID. That seemed like a rookie espionage move.

“Alright! I’m James. Dorm coordinator. Now, I know every student in the register, so I’m thinking _you_ are here either to register or to visit a student?”

“Yes. My niece, Riley Leta. Room four-sixty-six.”

“Ah! _La Chupacabra_.” James put a certain flair into his voice, one she was tempted to call “mocking.” “Do you know why she’s going by that? An in-joke, or anything? I’m reasonably sure there’s a bet going. Good-natured, of course.”

“We’re not close, unfortunately. I’m just returning her smartphone.”

“The mystery deepens! Let me text Riley, I’ll let her know her Aunt Jocelyn’s here to see her. Take a seat; this shouldn’t take long.”

Visha pulled up a white plastic chair, which was harder than it looked, and sat. The angle was such that, if she leaned just so in her chair, she could see the back of James’s neck while he texted, hopefully surreptitiously. There was discoloration, the beginnings of the standard eerie swelling, but his collar was high enough that it could’ve been an irregular tan.

James nodded at his phone. “Riley’s busy, but she appreciates it and she’d appreciate it if you came to her, she says. Our elevators are card-triggered, so I’ll have to take you up. Ready?”

“I’m ready.”

“After you, then.”

After he’d swiped her in and brought her to the fourth floor, quiet as an elevator attendant, the doors opened onto darkness.

“Is this… the right floor?” James leaned out and pointed out a brass _4_. It was fixed to the far wall, next to a lamp, and not at all reflective. Visha stepped out, felt her feet sink a little into the carpet, and turned to her left. There was a door, but the plate wasn’t readable.

Beyond the minor region illuminated by the elevator’s halo, she saw, the hall was unlit. All she could see was a narrow slice of floor, beige-carpeted. It looked ancient, but a maintained ancient, like an unused room that someone was still cleaning. The AC still worked, but it felt halfhearted. There was absolutely no smell to the air.

“You get rooms here by request only,” said James. “All singles, low light levels, and we deal with noise complaints with an iron hand.” He rubbed the back of his head. “Supposed to be a concentration aide. Far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t exactly make for healthy living conditions, but… it strikes me as, like, exactly how you’d do things if you wanted to turn maladjusted nerds into Neo Unabombers.” Visha wasn’t sure what James meant by shrugging about that, but let it go.

“Which way to room four-sixty-six?”

“Down that way and to the left. Then take a right at the second corner.”

“Thank you.”

“No worries!” James stepped back into the elevator, which closed, let out a surprisingly sonorous _ding_ , and descended, leaving Visha in the dark. She flicked on the flashlight setting on her smartphone and started walking. The carpet was soft under her feet in an unpleasant way — less _fluffy_ than it was _gauzy_ , sinking beneath her feet and springing back slowly. After a few steps, she felt unbalanced, her center of gravity drawn downward. It was tiring to walk on that carpet, but she managed.

It was a short walk, albeit a difficult one. Every corridor was short, straight and lined with closed dorm rooms, very few of them leaking the faint blue glow of computer monitors. None of them were making any sound, except for the common faint chattering that might’ve been high-pitched music, podcasts or the white noise of a TV left on an unwatched channel. Visha almost stopped to listen to one, but pressed on to 466 nonetheless. It was closed, dark, silent as any other door on the floor. Visha knocked twice, stood back and waited. After a solid minute, it opened, and la Chupacabra looked back at her, wearing heavy headphones, a T-shirt, sweatpants and a fading glazed look in her eyes, mildly irritated by a sudden flashlight. The T-shirt was glow-in-the-dark green, but too dim to see any design by. She stepped back. “You're -- Vogel. What's going on?”

By way of answer, Visha produced the black plastic baggie. “We’ve found some evidence. The Killer left a prop tooth at the scene of the crime, which they must have brought —”

“Since wright teeth aren’t individualized, right. Right. That means… 3D printers, local manufacturers, uh, overseas shipping checks from relevant corporations. Better than CCTVs, at least.”

“When should we be expecting results?”

“Uh. Not a completely specific answer, but ETA… a week? Maybe a week.”

“I’ll let Golde know.”

“Wait —“ La Chupacabra stepped out of her room, one foot across the threshold, facial expression invisible. “Do you want a drink?”

“I don’t drink. And neither should you. It’s —“ Realizing there was no actual legal drinking age on Moon Island, Visha decided to stick to her guns. “— not healthy for a student.”

“Just ginger ale. Or, water. Which might be flat. The ginger ale might be flat.”

“Why?”

“I have some questions, actually. For you.”

“Oh. Well, I have some time.”

Inside the room, Visha found herself sitting on a hard bed while her coworker searched a miniature fridge — its internal bulb the one light source available — for unopened cans of ginger ale. The room smelled like air fresheners, a chemical vanilla, stale and immobile. The far wall, she could see, was covered in computer monitors (insofar as a small wall with computer monitors on it could be “covered”), all switched off, with a rolling chair pitched to the side. It gave the room an unbalanced feeling, like it was going to pitch and fall.

La Chupacabra sat down next to her — on the other side of the bed, really, a solid few feet. “So.”

“Yes.”

"You're Visha Vogel."

"Yes."

“I wanted to ask... how did you start in this job? As an icebreaker, I guess.”

“It’s not an interesting story. I’ve been employed with Kourai since the emigration, and I was offered a position, which I took.”

“That far back?”

“Yes.”

“I got hired after I tried to, uh. Hack company servers. Well, phish them.”

“To what end?”

“Funds. Funding. And…” La Chupacabra shrugged. It was a crumpled kind of shrug, shoulders drawing in where they should have moved out further, but it was still recognizable as a shrug. “I wanted to buy my own wright.”

“Why? Any reason in particular?”

“To, I don’t know. Do chores. Carry my rig. Legwork. I’m good not in person but it’s been hard to communicate here, with the encryption, the, uh, issues on city servers -- I don’t want people reading my mail.”

“That’s understandable.”

“And so I stole a password and some requisition forms. Which was genuinely difficult, they’ve got actual common sense measures standardized for employees, so — I almost got it, before I got, basically, jackbooted people knocking on my door.”

“Company employees?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Aggressive acquisition, then. I don’t think that’s policy. Or at least it hasn’t _been_ policy for a while.”

“I guess not.” Visha coughed, a dry cough, and remembered her ginger ale. She drank while la Chupacabra was speaking; the taste was almost sour. “So now I do logistics. Uh, troubleshooting, kind of logistics. And I know you mentioned you were, I mean, you had a background, so. I wanted to consult you.”

“Mm,” said Visha.

“Okay. So, what we know. M.O., publicly available, and victim type also. Wrights.”

“Mostly female wrights.”

“Okay! Okay, that’s one data point. Female spec models. Publicly available, so publicly visible. Faking humanlike corpses with fake blood, bones, teeth, et cetera. Is there anything _ritualistic_ about it, like, revelatory or signature, beyond the way a serial crime M.O. is always a ritual, like a, uh, the word for… Zorro’s Z mark? A fame thing?”

"A calling card?"

"Yes. What's its -- what's the... mark?"

“That’s…” Visha paused. “Contentious.”

“Uh.”

“There are a few theories. Of course, the act isn’t done with the supposed weapons left behind — you can’t destroy a machine with a kitchen knife. It’s just an iconic image. Some are left at the scene, and others aren’t. Forensics suggest some kind of blunt weapon is being used to stop them before the work happens.”

“A blunt weapon. Like a bat? A sledgehammer, or…?”

“No, I don’t think so. Smaller. Heavier. The microfractures in the victims’ bodies suggest small points of impact.”

“Oh. Uh, I’m also kind of wondering how you got reports on this in the first place. Do you have contacts in enforcement? Or through Kourai, I guess.”

“A friend at my side job, actually. I could introduce you.”

La Chupacabra rubbed her neck. “I’m not actually all that interested in this subject outside, uh, work. But thanks.  I guess the question is, actually, if you’ve been analyzing this stuff this long, what’s the… point? Or common thread? What’re they doing this for?”

“For.” The question was one she’d considered before. Not extensively — motive didn’t figure much into her concept of the Killer — but after long nights of movies, soft pillows and the troubled nausea of her diet, that whispery tedium which motivated inspiration sometimes came upon her. It was something dead in the photos, the frame construct of the forensic camera. Tracing upwards, lens glinting in the streetlights, she’d drawn it to the Killer’s face, tried to imagine the one who turned machines into painted corpses, and seen nothing, been able to imagine nothing but a silhouette with no eyes, no skin over inanimate muscle, a perfect cipher. It hadn’t been a failure of imagination, she decided. It was a _choice_.

“I think… there’s a certain amount to which the scene is constructed as _real_ , but it’s not intended to have happened to anyone or have been done by anyone. The murderer and victim are both functions of the murder rather than people who had their reasons.” She searched for appropriate language. “I imagine… ghosts. They’re both just bodies, before and after the imagined act. They only become anything in its fulfillment. We’re not meant to sympathize or feel fear. We just recognize the aftermath — and that’s all they are. _Aftermath_.”

“…huh.” La Chupacabra wasn’t looking at her. “No… fear. You’re not afraid, at all?” There was a quaver in her voice.

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. Violence?” La Chupacabra looked straight at her, though her eyes still weren’t visible in the room which — Visha realized, feeling the total absence of sun, not even peeking through blinds — was completely windowless. “Reprisal?”

“From whom?”

“It’s not illegal, so. Anyone, really. This island is full of reasons to hurt us. And ways we could get hurt. FCED wrights. Even normal ones. They’re not actually hard to use as weapons, if you have the right permissions.”

It was Visha’s turn to shrug. “I’m not all that worried. Who would stand to profit by my dying?”

“And… well. Can we trust the wrights not to hurt us on their own?”

“They can’t hold grudges.”

“Even if they’re not… people, or complex thinkers, or if they can’t be complex thinkers. I think machines can _develop_ reasons to resent us. Simple brains that still might want to kill us.” La Chupacabra took a breath. Visha sipped her drink and watched the faint outline of a bobbing head. 

“How would a… simple brain _want_ outside the intelligence growth restrictions?”

“If… I don’t know, if they’re flawed restrictions. Or if a human wanted one to become that way. If those are just technical buzzwords — you can’t just discount that they’re — they’re everywhere. And I don’t know how the restriction thing works, or if it _d-does_ work perfectly all the time. It seems to me like it might be based on human assessments, and I don’t actually perfectly, uh, I don’t know how I should decide to trust the humans who assess whether they break, so —“

“…that’s something I can understand.”

La Chupacabra turned to her again, startled. She took a long moment to say “Y-you can?”

“Yes. I’ve seen things that made me suspect interference from whoever is jailbreaking wrights.” Visha thought back to it again; the image had thinned out in her head, wasn’t in the forefront of her mind all the time, but that unmodulated human skull pressing itself into the inside of the wright’s face felt worse in the light, in a certain way, without the plausible deniability of a nightmare. “I don’t know whether it ‘recognized’ me, but it seemed like it was meant to be hostile, or mocking, in a sick kind of way.”

“Oh.”

“Why this line of thought, exactly?”

There was no reply. She waited the requisite time, allowed some extra. Nothing.

“Well. I also wanted to ask — why la Chupacabra?”

“What?” La Chupacabra looked back at her — not that Visha had realized she was looking away. “Uh. It’s my, uh, my handle on a forum. I kind of started using it for privacy. Because the Chupacabra is the only kind of cryptid no one is looking for. Though it’s not that effective. You can, actually, you can call me Riley.”

“Right.”

They finished their drinks in silence.


	7. Chapter 7

It was kind of suffocating, sitting in the silence. After she’d finished, Visha decided to leave, to what she figured as mutual relief. “I don’t remember — which way to the elevators, again?”

“Oh. Uh, left. There would be signs, but, you know. Blackout.”

Visha turned back. “Blackout?”

Riley gave Visha a quizzical look. “Um, yes. You noticed the lights were off outside, right?”

“The elevators still work.”

“I think our elevators still work during blackouts. There’s emergency generators. Otherwise, we’d be trapped up here.”

“…I may have been tricked. Does a James work in this dorm? He mentioned you by name, but I suspect that was part of some kind of prank or feint.”

“I don’t really know anyone.”

“Right.” Stepping out into the dark hall, she looked back over her shoulder, imagined the face whose outline she could only barely see. Worried, maybe, but something inscrutable beneath it. She hadn’t flipped on her flashlight yet. “It might be wise to lock this.”

As Riley shut the door, she might have said something, but Visha didn’t hear anything besides “leave.” Alone again, she took stock. She had a headache, a stale, electrical feeling, and it made her want to reach for her pack of Sirens in a habit-forming kind of way. She wanted to be out in the sun again, not stifled by walking blind, making eye contact with invisible eyes in tiny rooms. It had gotten on her nerves. And the air conditioning had given up entirely, leaving nothing but an unseasonable coolness in the air. There was someone standing nearby.

It wasn’t anything like a chill down her spine, just a quiet certainty, a floating point in her awareness — a chill down the spine of space, maybe, to coin an almost completely unsuitable metaphor. It was there, not breathing, not moving, at some skew angle to her position. She tried a “Hello.” No response.

“I assume this is part of whatever you’re planning on doing by shutting down the power. I don’t like being threatened, so I’d appreciate it if you spoke.”

Nothing. Then, a vague, breathy noise, not even close to where she’d expected the shadow to be.

It was a soft sound. Nondescript. Visha turned towards it and felt a strange pressure in her teeth as something cool and hard felt her jaw and _squeezed_ with a relentless methodical grip that didn’t feel strongly about what it was touching at all. Pulling back reflexively made her neck twist, but the fingers were exploring her face, creeping higher as if trying to find her mouth, and the points where it already had purchase _ached_ , so she went limp and slipped downward and managed to pull lose of it, then swung a blind punch that hit in what felt like a solid fencepost. Visha sucked wind between her teeth, crawled back from another stiff-armed lunge and flicked up her flashlight to blind her attacker.

It was a human figure, pale, moving too quickly out of the flashlight’s beam to recognize. Despite the light she’d shined directly in its eyes, it lurched forward undaunted, swinging what seemed to her eyes to be a long crooked club, which slammed into the carpet near her head with a breathless, quiet _paff_. Dragging her baton from her belt, Visha’s fingers almost slipped, but she managed to swing for what she presumed was a kneecap. The impact jarred up her arm, a sickening feeling that she tamped down as she turned and clawed her way to her feet. 

One of its fingers brushed her back as she took a step, found her stride and _ran_ , feet evoking nightmare-logic-silent _paffs_ from the carpet. Visha put her all into running, hitting a corner with a sharp turn that felt unstable beneath her heel. She didn’t remember whether she’d turned there, originally, but it might help her get out of sight.

It was a wright. That it was a wright made no sense, but that leg was solid metal and, discounting a man with a heavy prosthetic, there weren’t many options besides wrights. Ditto its gait, the zombie lurch — its arms and potentially its legs had probably locked from some other, related violence, and yet it was running despite its body, designed to prevent this exact scenario. As it turned the corner, she tried to point her light at it again, but it was moving too quickly all of a sudden, a flicker out of sync with its paralytic arm, and she only caught a dull, baleful eye and a flicker of white before she had to turn and run again, following the curve of the halls, the surrealistic rectangular road to nowhere, doors that might as well have been walls, products of some lunatic’s bizarre design choices. She wasn’t afraid, she found, just focused to the exclusion of knowing her own position in space except as relative to whatever it was that was following her. It seemed like hours before she tripped over her own feet — didn’t fall, no, but found herself rebalancing, halting. It might not have been there any more.

After a few seconds in which nothing touched her, she turned, expecting to see nothing, and expecting to be wrong, and was still surprised to see a phantom outline, her eyes adjusted to the dark. There was a suggestion of hair, and the dull eyes, sprouting as if from nothing at all. Her mouth dry, she considered her next move. If she could say anything.

Before she could form the pointless words, its voice rang, high and clear, carrying unnaturally far in the silence. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Don’t you enjoy it?” The voice was androgynous. It had no discernible accent. There was a tinny echo to it, like it was coming from far, far away. The moment stretched.

"I --" started Visha.

“Ah, well.”

She was moving by the time it unfroze — stepping back in preparation to run — but as it shuddered to life it moved less like a person and more like bad stop-motion, hurtling through the intervening space, still inaudible thanks to the carpet; her own legs ached, like she’d been running on sand, exhaustion that almost burned, that forced all her strength into each movement. She caught the mass of its crooked arm on her shoulder, which sent jolts of pain holistically to her arm and torso. Luckily, it was her right, but she was still staggering, and with her eyes adjusting to the darkness it was little more than a vague shape. The next punch felt just as out of nowhere as the first had been, and came so close as to brush its knuckles against her face. They felt _sharp_ , though she didn’t know whether she’d been cut.

In pain, unbalanced and blind, something in Visha told her to exploit her position. Grabbing her attacker’s head with her right hand, she took her baton in a backhanded grip and rammed it in around head height. She was trying to crack a camera, throw off its internal balance, but she’d underestimated her leverage and the give of her pursuer’s legs; it staggered back, weight stern beneath the pressure of her baton. She only recognized the eyes, black and human and insectile all at once, before she turned and started running, following another eerie curve, hallways that didn’t look real or possible, rooms with no outside. It felt like miles until it all abruptly snapped back into a single door to a straight up-and-down stairwell which she almost ran into before making herself move to open it instead. 

The sunlight hit her in a single, colorless burst, real and simultaneously offensive to the eye. It hurt as she stumbled down flight of stairs down to the third floor, which (she confirmed at a glance through the glass-panel wall) was exactly as blacked out as the one above. 

Her legs almost buckled on the last step of the second-floor stairs, hitting solid white stone at a skew angle, but Visha managed to keep her balance just enough to _almost_ fall, and then maintained that almost-falling state at full tilt all the way down to the lobby. On the last few steps, her terror abruptly quit working out, and she collapsed into something which emerged out of nowhere and _hurt_ against her errant skull. Then she threw out her arms, jarring them, and hit with one final _paff_ that exceeded the carpet’s weight limit and met some kind of hard support underneath. That hurt too.

Visha lay there, aching in a stutter-frozen noncompliant muscular tangle, for about ten seconds’ worth of years. Her ears were ringing a little. Her heart rate was accelerated. But the core of her was barely taking input. Instead, it was just recording that it wasn’t dead yet every few seconds. It was a placid feeling. The rush in her system didn’t die down, but Visha Vogel herself was not panicking.

Eventually, something specific hurt enough that it brought her back to herself; with her right arm, she holstered her baton, releasing her death-grip on its shaft, and got back to her feet. Testing the pain in her cheek, one hand came away stained. She looked back to the window above the stairwell, tensing up to run again, but her attacker was nowhere to be seen. Only slightly faded sunlight, the shade of early evening on Moon Island, before the phantasmagoria of the city lights got into full swing. She’d been upstairs, talking or running or both, for much longer than it had seemed. And her attacker had vanished. Down in the lobby, with the soothing whisper of a functional central AC, everything felt slightly hallucinatory, enveloped in soothing mist. 

Able to see clearly-indicated arrows on the walls, Visha walked at a near-ordinary pace down a few short hallways to the lobby. The front desk was gone, as were the backless chairs. There were no indentations in the carpet from its legs, either, though she had to admit it was spongy enough that it might’ve just sprung back. Ditto no James. Both had looked so central that, in their absence, the lobby felt disordered.

Visha only barely started at the front doors swinging open, two young women — students, in white tees — coming in from the heat. Neither one looked remotely like android monstrosities, although, admittedly, she hadn’t seen the one on the fourth floor, besides a few minor details. Still, she stepped back as they looked at her. Stared, really, for a long few seconds, their voices lapsing. She considered asking them about James, but as she opened her mouth, one whisper-hissed something to the other, and they turned and left in a hurry, out of sync as they pushed through the front doors and vanished. Visha wondered why. It was possible that her injury was worse than she knew.

In any case, it seemed smart to clean up before leaving. There was a bathroom three corridors down, marked by the enthusiasm of a different designer — crystal glass and burgundy tile, a break from the soothing microclimate of the rest of the building. The stalls were spotless. As were the mirrors where Visha examined herself, polished to the expected sheen. But she didn’t look like she’d imagined herself. 

For one thing, her scrape from the fall was more of a genuine head wound than anything. In the mirror, she recognized it as a dark gash almost the length of her little finger, reaching high on her forehead. It was _convoluted_ , a complex zigzag with multiple apparent points of impact leaving red trails. She winced when she touched it. 

But she’d known that was there, at least. What surprised her was the rest — stains, hard to see against her complexion, but at the right angle her cheek reflected the light. Both cheeks, actually, and lower on her face, too. The stains were fresh, thinner than the red cruft on her forehead wound, and a different color — they were darker red, flecked with black, a stranger’s half-dyed blood type. For the most part, they were incoherent smears. Little rivulets of sweat had made most of them run. But the random pattern coalesced at the jawline, into a handprint, curling around to her neck as if to choke it. She looked like the last survivor, or the instigator, of some unknown massacre.

Wincing, Visha splashed water on the stains — including a few recalcitrant marks on her shirt collar, where the shadow had brushed her — and scrubbed. Then she washed the gash with stopgap hand soap, gritting her teeth until it wasn’t gory any more, and applied pressure via paper towel. It hurt, but it didn’t feel deep, and it stopped bleeding fairly quickly — so it had been. She’d lucked out. She dabbed at it a little more and made a mental note to buy disinfectant. It wouldn’t be smart to rely on good luck.

Having cleaned up, Visha looked at herself again. The cut was a grim maroon curve, just over her left eye, intersecting and bisecting her eyebrow deep enough that it might hypothetically scar. It broke the symmetry of her face. It was relatively small, in that special sense of the term which almost made it more noticeable. It made her already angular facial structure more _severe_. Violent, maybe. She’d have to bandage it.

Deciding that she wasn’t up to dealing with whatever attention she’d get for having her cut, Visha decided to leave via a back entrance, closer to the edge of campus. Her route took her by her point of impact, where — to her surprise — there was a not inconsiderable streak of color on the white abstract ornament attached to the stair’s railing. Three jutting edges completed the evidence, though only two had caught her skull and scored it. She grabbed the hem of her blouse, twisted it into a rag-shape and began sopping it up. Judging it clean enough to pass inspection, she let the hem hang, thankful it wasn’t trailing blood on her stomach.

_Now_ , thought Visha. She looked up to the top of the stairs. The adrenaline, her sense of narrative inevitability, everything told her that it would be there, silhouetted against the night sky. She was anticipating it with intense certainty, operating on the dregs of an adrenaline rush. So she looked for a black shape. It wasn’t there. The eye and the voice had disappeared, tracelessly.

She left nursing a headache, and stopped for aspirin and another pack of Sirens before she got back home.


	8. Chapter 8

Breakfast was eggs, again. Visha had never actually learned how to make meals worth eating, only ever managing the half measures of worthwhile ingredients. She had vitamin supplements, regular exercise routines coordinated by a pleasantly nonverbal app on her computer, et cetera, but those were factors she could leave in the hands of machines. The groceries — provided by a company that primarily delivered necessaries for busy programmers, a kind of metastartup that Kourai had hired for her — were designed to maintain her health. She knew that. And everything they wanted her to eat, she ate. But it took a long, twisted road to its final destination, heavy on salt and pepper and hot sauce and soy sauce and palpable ghost grease spawned from nowhere. Eggs into scrambled eggs, chicken into heaps of leftovers, fried and breaded vegetables, and the constant, unstoppable recurrence of cigarettes. All supplemented by the low-quality junk food available in every urban environment on earth.

After getting home, she’d taken the appropriate measures to get in contact with Golde — a short, innocuous email, one that could be intercepted by whatever corporate wiretappers or independent hackers did that kind of thing without giving the game away. The information economy was omnipresent enough, and distrust in vulnerable chartered city systems widespread enough, that they didn’t get much use. In order to actually report the situation, she'd have to do it in person, at the Black Sunfish. And the arrangements — making contact and making a reservation — would take a little time.

After that, she’d sat down at her bathroom mirror, lugging her desk chair over for somewhere to sit, and dressed her injuries. Admittedly, that mostly consisted of using a small pot of name-brand disinfectant, rinsing it more thoroughly, and applying a large medical bandage which she’d bought at a quick clinic near Avalon Polytechnic. Visha had considered an actual visit to a doctor, but she didn’t want to draw undue attention. And she didn’t want to pay that much. Hence, bandages, and a quiet, solitary jog back to her apartment. She bought a small plastic bowl of hot and sour soup from a somewhat more affordable takeaway place on the way. The sensation was a little stringent, considering that her cut already ached, but it didn’t look or feel infected, per her understanding of infection. It hadn’t taken long.

So after _that_ , she’d made dinner, a sausage omelette and a glass of tomato juice (they gave her bottled tomato juice, which seemed like an absolute lunatic choice of beverage), done her laundry — excising that black fingerprint blood from the collar of the nice shirt provided by Kourai; it took two loads to get it pristine — and watched another movie on a streaming service. Contrary to expectations, the day’s attack of surrealism never quite hit her. It was possibly shock, Visha decided — if she wasn’t just fine — and as far as she knew, there was no way to decide her way out of emotional paralysis. So she sat down, ate and let herself be engrossed in the movie. It was another Amir Munir, title _Nothing Ever Happens Here_ , starring Gina Godot and Bitty Hart.

It was fairly standard, by his standards: a small Oregon town, deep woods, all the typical forestry and lumberjacks and the iconic, nostalgic rusty sawblade aesthetic it implied. The victims were a mix of teenagers and adults, all flighty, distractible, often vicious, alcoholics and addicts, who were assemblies of character traits poised on the brink of self-annihilation. The killer was three hundred pounds of raw hamburger pounded into an anthropoid body. It was immortal, a rehash Frankenstein’s Monster cured of its pyrophobia, its teeth an arc of spikes hammered into its gums with extreme prejudice.

The trick of it was the final scene: final girl versus killer. Her, beaten to shit and leg a stump, skin matted with filth and the debris of the lumber mill. Bloodied, and _bowed_ , taut, one-eyed, armed with an enormous spike manufactured in the very same factory where the killer had been born by virtue of having had it pounded through her fist (an effect which, according to the forums, had involved an actual cadaver, a sledgehammer and a complicated rigging system for the blood bags, to ensure realism). The tan actress from the beginning, Gina Godot, had been forged by Hollywood — by the art of Amir Munir — into a literary and narrative object. And, against her, the killer. The actor wasn’t credited. The killer wasn’t CGI, either. No name given.

(If she’d been asked what her attacker _was_ —)

They squared up, lit only by the embers of a dying fire and the screeching sparks of a tangle of machinery. Like duelists, maybe. Her railroad spike and his sledgehammer, aligned along a single lane, a conveyor belt. The audience didn’t know where the killer was, where the girl was, where they were, until the firelight, chewing through rotten timbers and licking at long-abandoned iron forced them into existence. 

(She might have said that it wasn’t a person. That it didn’t even resemble one. The FCED wright had had an actual expression, however strained and badly-programmed. But this one hadn’t been anything but stiff arms and legs hurtling towards her, a vapid body. And a single eye, without even the lenses of common wrights, and thus as flat as glass.)

They lost hands, shrieked and howled, lumbered forward in the hideous noise to tear away skin. The climactic conflict, the thematic weapons, every word became pointless and unutterable. They pounded each other with stumps, with bone spurs, with howling that tried desperately to become language — until one reached out with its remaining hand, found purchase on skin and _yanked_ away whatever loose strips of dangling muscle remained — only then did a can of gasoline catch and illuminate its triumph, wearing the final girl’s silver cross’s chain around its neck but gripping that cross in its fingers and _twisting_ the head to a crooked angle, face covered in lifeblood, tar blackness deep down in the red.

* * *

 It took Melville a few seconds to articulate a sentence about Visha’s cut, and what she managed was a little garbled: “What did you — Jesus, that’s _large_.”

“Is it?” said Visha.

“Absolutely, it’s large, dude. That length, if it’s raking up like that, I mean, even if it’s shallow it has to be deep. Is that sanitary?”

“It’s broad, but shallow.”

“Shallow. Jesus Christ.”

“Nothing unusual. I just fell and cut myself.” Melville scrutinized Visha, but she held fast; as far as she knew, it might’ve been the ridiculous nautilus on the railing that cut her, not the brush of bare metal against her skull. “Thank you for your concern.”

That earned her a narrow look, not quite decided on what to convey, before Melville almost audibly dropped the topic to return to her work and her greasy sandwich. Visha waited out the requisite silence.

“The photos worked out for you? Whatever it is you do with them.”

“They were well-shot. Please thank your source for me.”

“See, that’s my point of confusion. Well-shot. Like, the audience here is a total cipher to me, except the part where they want to see fictional assault look as real as possible, for… what? Speculation? Speculative purposes? A Ripperology thing?” Melville kept typing. Her teeth were showing. “There’s a market, here. Or at least a reputation market. And the demand is just completely impenetrable.”

“Mm.”

“I mean, I’m not asking _you_ to explain it. You don’t have an account on here, far as I know, so you’re an outlier, so I’m not going to speculate.”

“I wouldn’t, either. My interest’s a little particular to me.”

“Particular, alright. Sure. But the wall for me is —“ Whatever gesture came to Melville’s mind didn’t quite complete the image of her ideas. “—they’re _wrights_. Everyone fundamentally gets it, that it’s all food coloring and glue and whatever plastic tubing they use for intestines. Broken toys. Who _cares_?”

Before Visha could formulate any kind of response, Melville sighed in an inaccessible kind of way. “Ergh. In a bad mood. Folks finding reasons to be assholes are usually also experts on finding new techniques for _being_ assholes, just spreading it to every environment they’re in or adjacent to, and I know that is the basic mode for any internet community, but still! Still.”

“Hmm.”

“I mean. The emigration… that’s never not going to be complicated, yeah.” Melville rubbed the back of her head. “But the ‘corporate Trail of Tears’ thing is — not even _trying_ at nuance or charity, just ‘oh, financially motivating the movement of a small group, that’s basically the same thing as a forced march for Native Americans by executive fiat,’ Christ…”

Only half-listening, Visha waited for an opportunity to talk. Once Melville had stopped — a little after the sentence “coercion actually means something” — she nodded. “I can see what you mean.”

“Yeah. It’s just low standards of discourse, y’know? Or a… I don’t know, pathological resentment politics. None of which is actually coming from native islanders, just white knights.”

“None at all?”

“Nah. Too busy actually contributing and supporting themselves. Working for an honest dollar in whatever they do best — like you and me. That’s valuable internet tough guy time for everyone else.”

Visha breathed deep. The smell of Cyberia would linger on her clothes for the rest of the day.

* * *

After work — insofar as slacker waitressing at Cyberia counted as work, considering the godawful pay — she had an appointment at the Black Sunfish, as per Visha’s coded message. She arrived later than she’d expected, and took some time to dry off in the lobby. Her sweat and the seafood aroma would not mix well.

“No reports of your attacker were filed at Avalon Polytechnic, as far as we know. You say they were already bloody?” Golde had produced a small notepad application on her phone at the mention of the attack, and was writing down details in a loopy shorthand.

“Leaving residue on my neck and my collar, yes. But both have been washed, so we don’t have DNA evidence. It didn’t seem wise to me to risk being seen like that.”

“And your injuries can be explained by your fall.”

“I believe so.” Visha tapped her bandage, “If this was them, I didn’t notice at the time.”

“Hmm.”

“It seems implausible —“

Golde clicked out of the app and looked Visha directly in the eyes. “I have no reason to believe you’re telling me anything other than the truth, but you must admit it is full-stop-implausible.”

“I’ll admit it’s surreal. But anything that happens can be explained. Confusion just means we’re missing facts.”

“You don’t need to justify yourself, Visha.”

“How so?”

“Whether or not you’re right, we don’t have many leads, and large-scale investigations risk discovery. The best we can manage is assigning your street more FCED patrollers, in case of further attacks.”

“Which might be compromised.“

Golde shrugged. “Our options are limited. Corporate is fairly conservative in these situations.”

“Then our plan is to hunt it per standard jailbreaking?”

“To whatever limited extent I can manage to convince them. Julius might appreciate the challenge.” Golde leaned across to Visha’s ear, conspiratorial-close. “I say this in confidence — he’s playing up the ‘gruff old expert’ act. I think he likes to be treated like Captain Ahab.”

“How effective will he be alone?”  


“It’s the best I can do. While I have some push on your collective behalf, I’m more your… handler, for lack of a better word, than anything else.”

That — the almost-cavalier casualness of the word _handler_ in Golde’s mouth — gave Visha some pause. She covered it with a bite of her noodles, anonymous sauce almost but not quite sour. _Handler_ , i.e., she required handling by whatever boardroom mechanisms were operating in the gullet of that euphemism, corporate, Golde being the hand at the end of that arm. It would mean — what, exactly, about her own role? About the chain of command?

She’d been quiet for long enough that Golde turned to face her fully, having drained the rest of her shallow, expensive china cup. “I hope you know that I don’t consider _handling_ you a —“

“No,” said Visha, meaning it. “It’s your job. We both do what we have to do. I’m… glad you trust me enough to tell me in so many words, instead of skirting around it.”

That earned her a rare smile. “You know,” said Golde, “I thought you might say something like that.”

“Am I that predictable?”

“Not in a bad way.”

“I didn’t think it was an insult in the first place.”

“A toast, then! To mutual predictability.” Golde signaled the man behind the counter, who made to pour her another glass. “Ah, just the bottle, please.”

“I still don’t drink.”

“Which I also knew you’d say.”

For a while, they ate and drank in silence.

Once Visha was down to leftovers, she turned back to Golde. “Any news on the tooth?”

“Yes, actually. I would’ve mentioned it if you hadn’t.” Golde produced a small envelope, a standard brownish-orange, unsealed. While Visha leafed through the contents — a building plan, the destination setting for a self-driving car, and miscellaneous briefings — Golde finished her second drink.

Visha triangulated the destination in her head; from the look of the site in photos — a looming, slumping hulk of actual concrete, with weeds poking out of cracks in the asphalt and a single, forlorn streetlight missing its head — it was too badly-maintained to be anywhere close to them. “So our lead is sited in the barrens.”

“Riley’s traced the plastic to shipments being conducted outside the city center, yes. In a small consumer electronics factory. They claim it’s for constructing custom cases for smartphones.”

“And there’s not enough demand for that kind of product to justify a factory so far from the city… are they making it obvious on purpose?”

“That’s what you’ll be finding out. Well, you and Thaddeus. In two nights, you’ll be conducting a preliminary investigation. Subtle, of course. Avoid breaking in.”

“Well, of course.”

“You’d be surprised at how often we have to remind the others…” Golde trailed off. Then she looked up, made direct eye contact, and her slightly watery eyes focused through the mist of Japanese liquor and nighttime. It was more than attentive; Golde was always attentive. There was a force to her eyes.

“…we are predictable, aren’t we?”

“Well. Yes…?”

“We discuss work. You discuss movies, and maybe wrights. I try to convince you to try a drink, only I don’t think I could be described as _really_ trying. It’s just what we do. Not drinking and talking, et cetera. And then you go back to your apartment.”

Visha had never seen Golde drunk, or even tipsy. The toast — a second cup of a fairly potent drink, whose minor caustic fumes she could smell from a few feet away — would certainly explain the sudden attention, the investment, in Golde’s voice, and the smile on her lips. “Uh, do we?”

“Tell me… something else about yourself.”

“That’s too abstract. I mean, the answer could be anything —“

“Anything’s fine. The first thing that pops into your head. Think of it as a psych exercise.”

“…”

She’d been working — troubleshooting — in a professional capacity for years. Since Kourai signed its charter for Moon Island, as a matter of fact. In that time, Visha had known Golde as a colleague and friend, her confidant and non-drinking buddy. They ate together, or Visha ate alone — solitary takeout or homemade meals. Either way, she didn’t go out. The work, the nighttime hunts, armed with her snap-out magnetized baton and a knife (and before that, other tools, hammers and surplus riot gear and one attempt with a rifle that she’d abandoned after it became clear how _loud_ guns were), was her only pursuit, stretching back to the end of her mental horizon. She prepared for work all the time, was devoted to it rigorously, and that meant always being available. Which wasn’t a problem. Visha Vogel was always, always available.

Outside movies, she knew wright anatomy and design, but her knowledge was practical for demolition, which is to say, too esoteric for normal people and too incomplete for enthusiasts. And no one particularly wanted to talk about cinema with her, outside internet auteurs and polite listeners. So she engaged with the world entirely in the context of what already worked: work.

Movies, meals, and wrights. Seamlessly sewn into each other, so that she lost track of time; for a while, Visha had dealt with insomnia, and then a feeling of temporal cognitive dissonance which — she imagined — was like jet lag. Only the appearance of the Pygmalion Killer had disrupted the cycle of waking, hunting and sleeping. She’d only started following the topic after she’d started working part-time and met Melville, and of course there were barriers to entry which the average person wouldn’t have passed. There was a very specific set of ideas and behaviors which characterized Visha Vogel.

So she cast about for something and hit on a single explainable detail, from before Kourai: “I used to play baseball.”

“Baseball. What position?”

“I was an outfielder.”

“And when was this?”

“Years ago.”

“And... why did you stop?”

Visha considered the question.

“I ran out of field.”

Golde relaxed. “That’s a remarkably badly-timed joke.”

“Was it?”


	9. Chapter 9

The Polaris was cool and comfortable, its suspension making the already quiet roads whisper-smooth and -soft. The air conditioning made for a comfortable, breathy numbness, mobile stasis rolling down the street. Visha had to resist falling asleep in her seat, so thickly cushioned that it might’ve been a repurposed recliner. For the sake of staying awake, she’d stopped for coffee, and pointedly decided not to buy cigarettes, discarding a half-full pack — a weight like a deck of cards in her breast pocket, perversely close to her heart — in the gas station trash. She sipped it en route. It was bitter, in a necessary way.

Thaddeus noticed her before she noticed him; he was waving and smiling as the Polaris pulled into place. Visha unlocked the back door, and he stepped inside, sinking into the cushions with an expansive shrug. He was dressed strangely: compared to Visha’s spare jacket and forgettable baseball cap, he was almost formal, dressed in a cheap black suit, a flimsy white collared shirt broken by his lengthy red tie, and the exact same red-lensed glasses he’d been wearing when they first met. He wore smart, sheer black gloves. Clasped in an offhand grip, he had a large, metal lunchbox, the kind with a handle, its surface sharp scarlet and chrome, with a cartoon character on it. It was a lanky indeterminate animal with bulging Osamu Tezuka eyes, gesturing to its own speech bubble with one gloved hand. “EAT LIKE A KING!” it declared. “Evening,” he declared.

“Good evening.” She nodded to him. 

“How’s our itinerary looking?”

“The ride is an hour and a half to two hours, traffic notwithstanding.”

“Not much in the way of traffic out _there_ , I figure.” he said. “Drinking coffee?” 

“Yes.”

“I’d ask you if you bought me any, but I never touch the stuff.” He laughed a brief and unembarrassed laugh.

“You brought your own lunch.”

“Just a lunch- _box_ , actually. It’s my gear. Comfortable grip, easy to transport, not suspicious, and only a little smaller than most suitcases.” Thaddeus rapped it with his knuckles. Something clattered inside. “You got your kit ready?”

Visha indicated her wright-flaying knife, secure, discreet and not obviously a pseudo-vivisection tool, and the rubber grip of her baton.

“So _professional_. You’re making me feel out of practice, miss Vogel.”

“Is… that all for self-defense?” It looked too bulky to be sensible. Moon Island by-laws said almost nothing about possession of deadly weapons; there was no reason to conceal a firearm, or anything else Thaddeus might have, unless it was some kind of bizarre torture tool (which was why Visha’s flaying knife was concealed in a bulky rectangular sheath) or beyond self-defense caliber, i.e., high explosives.

“Well, they _do_ say a good defense is the best offense."

“We’re going to do this without calling undue attention to ourselves.”

Thaddeus raised a hand, waving her off. “Joking!” he said. “I got the same brief you did. No firearms or explosives, we’re maintaining tight opsec, we use force in self-defense only, we’re all green.” It hadn’t sounded like a joke to her, but there was no way to say that tactfully. Instead, she reclined her seat to a more comfortable position.

“I’m going to get some rest. Wake me up when we arrive.”

“Sure.”

Sleep wasn’t forthcoming, thanks to the coffee, so Visha listened to the hum of the car and the autonomic tight-turning roll of the steering wheel, and watched the passing streetlights. There weren’t many, and fewer buildings were lit beyond the futuristic riot of the city center, but she was still in no position to see the stars; the sky was as flat and unclean as a fogged mirror.

Time passed in the fugue state common to every car trip she’d ever been on.

Before long, they passed, unceremoniously and in silence, through the layer which Visha was used to thinking of as the outer city, in which almost all her wright hunts took place. It was remarkably narrow, looking back — a band measurable in city blocks. They’d passed another few FCED patrollers, eyes mercifully unfocused. Honey-yellow windows in apartment complexes, utilities, actual pedestrians, and one or two trees, native species. There might have been a park somewhere in there, though she’d never visited. They’d left that stretch behind when they crossed Merchant Street, and the scale of the actual “outer city” — the outermost stratum of stone and roads, encrusted on Moon Island’s back, the foundation of the city center — began to make itself known. The Polaris took an on-ramp to an elevated section of street, four lanes to handle a deluge of traffic. They went fifteen minutes and passed two cars on that track, both exceeding the speed limit, because who would stop them? Three, if she counted the husk of a SUV in an adjacent lane, as hollow as a dislodged wasp’s nest. The buildings she could see around them, some below the bridge and some adjacent to it, were solid silhouettes that the headlights just slid off. There was very little paint left anywhere.

At ground level, passing beneath an overhang attached to a skeletal parking garage, a pattern emerged. Every few streetlights, there was one out, or cracked or dim, or even just not present, a civil planning anomaly. It was never a regular pattern. Visha started counting the distance between circles of light, tiny bites taken out of the night. Bright, bright, nothing, bright, bright, flickering, dim, nothing, bright, nothing, and past that point the city planners had given up, judging by the endless row of dead or missing lamps. And then they were just all missing, and red lights at intersections (which the car didn’t run, despite the total absence of traffic) were their only illumination.

From then on, it was absolutely pointless to look outside. The Polaris kept heading straight, its headlights not finding purchase on anything long enough that either of them could see. It was quiet enough that she turned on the radio, but couldn’t find any stations. And the terrain shifted, too, unpredictably, until Visha’s back hurt. Every few seconds, the Polaris shifted in its frame, almost _jumping_ , auto-compensating for an irregular road. With potholes, it would have just dampened the impact. This was a consistent, unpredictable grain, an imbalance that was making Visha carsick. Though it was half the Polaris’s fault, she decided. Its hair-trigger adjustments weren’t exactly helping. It wasn’t enough to do more than give her a nasty headache, but it would make getting substantial rest impossible, so she rolled her seat back to the upright position.

Thaddeus wasn’t taking it any better than she was, judging by his look of mild consternation. It was directed at a book in his hand, a tattered old paperback with the title _John Carter of Mars_ , but he didn’t seem all that focused on it, in the typical dreary daze of motion sickness. He noticed her looking and gave her a weak smile. “Any idea how long it’s been?”

“An hour and fifteen minutes. We’ll be arriving shortly, I think.”

“Do we have a point of entry?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’m sure it won’t be hard to find one. They don’t pay too much attention to security, out here.”

Eventually, after a long descent — streets sloping downwards between black unreal buildings — the car slid to a gentle, three-point halt near what looked to be, at last, a functioning streetlight, an island in the pavement ocean. They weren’t actually _at_ the listed location. With the car’s high beams flicked on, the reason became obvious: a chain-link fence, with a gate, presumably motion-sensitive. It was squeaking quietly, tugging at the lock in vain. They were just outside the little lot island around the warehouse.

Visha stepped out of the car to look more closely. The fence’s hinge mechanism was fused shut by a clump of rust, each the size of a child’s fist, and so was the lock, for good measure. The Polaris was parked by a parking meter whose head was hanging off, still held by a thick bundle of wires, like a half-decapitated cartoon robot. That was all she could see of the fence in the headlights; peering past it, there were a few slender tree trunks. What might have been the warehouse stood as part of the anonymous horizon line made by all the other abandoned overhangs and garages and useless buildings. This far from the city, only registering as a dim neon glow, they were completely alone, together, at the bottom of a valley of abandoned everything.

Thaddeus stood, or unfolded, to his full height, and slipped the lunchbox over his shoulder. “End of the road. Though this whole neighborhood seems like one big _end of the road_ , sometimes.”

“Mmm.” Visha considered their options. “Do you have… I don’t know, wire cutters?”

“Something similar, but I doubt they can cut the fence.”

“Then we should check the perimeter for other entry points.”

“On foot?”

“In the car.”

“If you say so, but I don’t think these older models actually do local navigation outside parking corrections. Won’t it just try to bring us back here?”

“If we drive, it should be fine.” There was a steering wheel present in the car, since it had been built before autonomous traffic AIs had outpaced human drivers in safety. Visha opened the door and took a look at the driver's seat, pristine and unused. There wasn’t any place to turn a key, or any key, for that matter. She stepped aside.

“What’s the matter?” said Thaddeus.

“If we’re actually driving, you should be at the wheel.”

“Why’s that?”

Visha sighed. “I don’t have a driver’s license,” she said, though it pained her to do it.

Thaddeus blinked. “What, really?”

“Yes. Really.”

“…well. I’m not one to judge.” With a shrug, he elbowed her over a step and slipped into the driver’s position, bouncing a little in the chair. Visha popped the other door and sat down next to him, watching him reach for the nonexistent key, hesitate, then lean forward to look at the dashboard.

After a few seconds of investigation, he located the switch — an anonymous silver trigger with a red label, firetruck-bright compared to the cool cobalt and chrome, a lapse in color scheme which struck Visha as kind of unwholesome, like seeing a skull and crossbones in a spice rack. That feeling was confirmed when their seats ratcheted forward a solid foot each, bringing her closer to the dash and the windshield than was healthy. It was a nauseating movement. By the time she’d gotten over it, the automated pharmaceutical-commercial woman voice had finished its warning about the hazards of human-propelled vehicles.

Hesitating, Thaddeus managed to evoke a humming growl from the engine, grinned, and reversed onto a side road nearby. “Like riding a bike,”he said. Then they were off. Their pace was slow, following rough potholed roads through thick squid-ink darkness at the bottom of the valley of Moon Island’s barren industrial districts, and Visha strapped on an emergency seatbelt halfway through Thaddeus’s second close encounter with a curb, but they were making decent time.

“So,” said Thaddeus.

“So?”

“Can I ask why _don’t_ you have a driver’s license?”

“I don’t own a car.”

“Don’t drive, either?”

“No.”

“I wonder, is that a ‘don’t’ don’t or a ‘can’t’ don’t?”

Visha declined to reply, which Thaddeus took to mean something she didn’t bother to figure out. “I mean, haven’t used _mine_ since I arrived — what with all the self-driving cars up here — but I’ve always thought there’s a pleasure in knowing _how_ , use it or not.”

“We think differently, then.”

“And you don’t ever need it for ID?”

“An ID issued by a charter corporation works just as well. I have one, per the terms of my employment.” After some digging in her wallet, Visha produced a sleek black card with a golden crown insignia, looking sharp despite its rounded edges. “I don’t _need_ a driver’s license.”

His shrug and smile comprised an easy dismissal. “Suit yourself. Just funny, I thought.” The car stopped with another stomach-rattling jolt, and Visha almost said something curt before she noticed Thaddeus had stopped on purpose. “We’ve got a gap in the fence. Think you can fit through, check conditions?”

It was wide, which said something about local security. This far out, the city didn’t provide camera systems or patrol for crime, but even then it should’ve taken more than cover of electrically useless night for Visha to sneak in. With shoulders tight, looking for the unbelievably absent guards or some kind of obvious countermeasure, she got through without even snagging her shirt, though her cap did briefly catch on a short wire before she clutched it to her head. She turned and gave a thumbs-up, which Thaddeus mirrored. He reached into the car and said something in a kind of jovial voice; it chimed, a lovely lucid sound, and sped off with its former confidence, taking a tight turn out of sight. “Our ride will meet us back here in a few hours,” he said. “Don’t want to be obtrusive.”

“How many?”

“Call it three.”

There was enough clearance for Thaddeus to get in, too, and he had an even easier time bending down and getting through than her; the man was basically a human concertina. While he brushed grime off his pants and complained mildly about his nice red shirt, Visha looked the area over. A little pavement on their end gave way to patchy grass, long island strains desperately reaching out to escape the yellow death traveling up their own spines. She started walking towards the warehouse, and the ground, pulverized by neglect and her hard boots, was rigid and dry.

It was a dry night. Down this far, it was almost all dry — air unlike the city center, an elderly odor, sea salt and lingering rottenness, acerbic lifelessness. Like someone had let a dumpster putrefy in the ocean, long ago, until there was no source of fumes left — picked clean by the gulls or just decomposed into its lowest-entropy state. They moved slowly, together, towards the warehouse, with no flashlight and no signpost besides its mammoth presence. At some point, Thaddeus had started whistling. He was the type.

It took maybe ten minutes to reach. Motion-sensor LEDs flicked on as they stepped into the parking lot, unused and level. A car too ancient to be functioning — a gas-powered station wagon, the kind you only got on the mainland — sat decomposing in a handicapped space. The wall looked like brutalized iron, with grilles set to allow shipments in and out; one solitary door, with a handle that wouldn’t move even when Thaddeus leaned on it with all his weight, indicated humans had ever used the place, as opposed to some race of urban-decay giants.

“Nowhere to get in, if we want to be subtle,” said Visha. “You mentioned wire cutters. Anything to get inside?”

In response, Thaddeus set down his kit on the ground and flicked the latches open. Visha caught a flash of dull-colored plastic — wires? — before he shut it again and produced a small black velvet pouch. “Lockpicks.”

“Workable.” Visha hid genuine surprise — from what she’d seen of Thaddeus Flagg, she hadn’t expected that as part of his skill set. Which was, as a matter of fact, hypocritical, considering that her own skill set consisted of a magnetized nightstick, a short knife, anatomy, knowing film, and whatever utility she could eke out of a common cellphone.

“Hey, don’t act so shocked,” said Thaddeus. He took a minute to examine the lock, then selected a few lengths of wire and gleaming metal from labeled sub-pockets and began fiddling with it. “Might be a few minutes.”

“Mmm.”

As before, Visha’s urge, out here with the dust and rust and pickled-flesh smell, was to light up. The Sirens were a little parasite colony in her front pocket, occupying her attention any time she was idle or stressed, in lieu of the intellectual stimulus of movies, or cooking, or conversation. She knew it was an addiction, but knowing didn’t actually make it easier unless she could substitute something else.

No time, nothing to do, and no cell reception. The clicking of the lock reminded her of her one option. “Do you watch movies often?”

“Movies?” Thaddeus paused in his work and turned around. He seemed a little confused.

“It’s just an idle question. Feel free to keep working.”

“Hard to do both, but I’ll manage.” The clicking started again. “I’m no film buff, but I’ll go to the theater sometimes, if time and money permit. How about you?”

“I enjoy them. Mostly via streaming service.”

“Liked that _Chesscourt_ movie they did last year. Never read past the first book, but I hear the adaptation hit the right notes.”

“I haven’t seen it.”

“Well, what kind of movie _do_ you like?”

“Horror.”

“Horror! Wouldn't have guessed it.”

“Yes. Mostly traditional entries into the slasher and supernatural genres, but well-written psychological horror is always satisfying. Particularly a few recent directors — Thomas Shelhart, Dana Duncan, Amir Munir… whom I consider auteurs.”

“Slasher films.” Thaddeus considered that, pausing in his work. “Well, do you like, uh, _The Shining_?”

“‘Like’ how so?” 

“Like as in… enjoy?”

“That’s still fairly broad.”

“Then —“

“It’s a fascinating study, of course. Tensely executed, intrusive, surreal, and sparing but effective use of gore — the stark and direct reveal of Jack’s corpse in particular. Though the special effects sometimes feel underwhelming. I couldn’t take the room full of skeletons seriously, for one.”

She’d seen it a few years ago, part of a binge of everything local streams had to offer. “But you classify it as a slasher. I don’t think that’s exactly the point. Slashers are the heart of their franchises, they are _beyond_ human, but Jack Torrance is almost incidental to what happens. There’s no animating essence to him, the way that there is in, say, Jason. It’s just his alcoholism and anger issues, hurting his family the way they always have. His decay and collapse are the art.” She felt at the concept, searched for words, gestured at the solid shape in the air, tried to transcribe it with a motion. “But for slashers, the _act_ of murder is the art. Identity is meaningless and justifications are vapid. All we, as an audience, are here to do is to witness a murder. Everything else is gratis.”

There was a pronounced _click_. “There we go.” There was also an unfamiliar note in Thaddeus’s voice. “You know… you’re hard to read sometimes, miss Vogel.”

“What do you mean?”

“…ah, don't worry about it.”

The door swung open ahead of them, into a barely lit expanse, and Visha realized that the conversation was over.

**Author's Note:**

> Trying for a weekly update schedule -- a new chapter every Wednesday. Get on my case if I don't.


End file.
